


Infinite Space

by DiscontentedWinter



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, M/M, Peter is the Left Hand, Scott McCall is a Bad Friend, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Stiles is the Left Hand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-04 05:05:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6642445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles needs Peter's expertise to help stop the latest threat to Beacon Hills.<br/>And, as the pack falls apart around him, he might even need Peter for more than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is being written to celebrate hitting 500 followers on Tumblr. Yay! 
> 
> My Tumblr is here: [thisdiscontentedwinter](http://thisdiscontentedwinter.tumblr.com)  
> This one is for @missisnorris, who asked for Steter, full shift wolves, and Stiles breaking Peter out of Eichen.

 

 

Stiles dreams of a wolf.

A brown wolf—though its coat is marbled with gray and black and caramel— with a thick ruff, a sharp muzzle, and clever eyes that follow him when he moves.

In his dreams he’s not afraid when it walks beside him.

He drops his hand and lets his fingertips brush against its coarse fur.

He’s not afraid in his dreams, and he’s not alone.

 

***

 

“I don’t know,” Stiles says. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Malia is sitting cross-legged on his bed, with a math textbook open in front of her. “Me neither.”

“Not math.”

Malia rolls her eyes at him. “I _know_ , Stiles! Math always makes sense to you.”

“It has rules,” Stiles points out. “It has a series of logical steps. It has _patterns_.”

He and Malia aren’t dating anymore, but she still comes to him for help with homework, and advice about boys. Stiles isn’t sure that his perspective helps much. It’s weird, right, to be giving his ex-girlfriend dating advice? Not the weirdest thing in his life by a long shot, of course. But still weird.

“I just…” He sighs, and drags his fingers through his hair. “He made an alliance with Deucalion. _Deucalion_. Who tried to kill us how many times?”

“Three,” Malia hazards. “Four?” She catches his look. “More than four?”

Malia still hasn’t got the hang of rhetorical questions.

“Like Boyd and Erica don’t even matter.”

Malia’s expression softens. “Stiles. Sometimes you have to make a deal with the devil. That’s the saying, right?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “And I get that. That’s _me_. I’m that guy. Scott isn’t.”

Malia chews on her lower lip for a moment, then slams her textbook shut. “Isn’t it a good thing that he’s getting smarter?”

It is. Of course it is. Stiles knows that, logically. It’s just… after Donovan and Theo and all the shit with the Dread Doctors, it feels like he can’t trust Scott any more. There were too many times this summer when Scott didn’t have his back. When Scott didn’t even notice that anything was wrong. And objectively, Stiles understands that. There was a lot going on. And objectively he knows that friendships change over time, that they evolve, maybe even devolve, but Scott’s always been the sort of guy who makes friends easily. Stiles isn’t. Stiles is pretty sure Scott is it for him in the best friend stakes. Stiles doesn’t know who he is if he’s not Scott McCall’s best friend.

They’ve been friends since kindergarten, when Scott was too naïve to notice that Stiles was weird and twitchy and terrible at social cues. Stiles feels like a tick who attached himself to Scott McCall’s life when Scott was too little and stupid to get rid of him, and Stiles isn’t going to get another opportunity to hijack a friend like that, is he?

The summer has changed Scott. It’s like Malia says: Scott’s learned how to make deals with the devil. And maybe Stiles is freaking out because he knows that if Scott’s finally taking off his rose tinted glasses and seeing the world for the fucked-up horrible place it really is— _hey, has this glass always been half empty?_ —then maybe he’s going to look at Stiles and see how fucked-up and horrible he is too. And that terrifies him more than anything that’s ever burst out of his nightmares and straight into his life.

“Stiles?” Malia asks again. “It’s better isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he says at last, with a quick grin he knows Malia doesn’t believe for a second. “Yeah, of course it is.”

 

***

 

Stiles’s dad is the best.

“Felt good, didn’t it?” he says. “Saving all those people?”

Like John knows that’s what makes Stiles feel whole, or at least a little less broken for a while. Sometimes Stiles doesn’t know how to save himself, but that’s okay. He knows how to save other people.

He learned that on the run.

 

***

 

When Stiles was a little kid, he used to sneak out of the house and head down the street to visit the old lady who lived there. She had a box of slides in a box in her living room: tiny little pictures in white or brown plastic frames that she put in a projector. She didn’t have a screen. She used to pin a white sheet to her curtain rail, and then Stiles would sit and eat cookies while she pushed the thing on the projector that made the slides show up on the wall, big.

Sometimes Stiles played with the focus to make the pictures go big and fuzzy, and then he’d twist the thing the other way and make them go sharp and tiny. The projector used to get really hot, and the old lady would mutter at Stiles in Latvian whenever he touched the bulb and burned his fingers, and then she’d take him to the sink and run cold water over his fingers, and give him more cookies and call him _mīļotais_ to make him feel better.

When he was five, Stiles couldn’t really understand why he was drawn to the slides, and to the connections the old lady had to people who lived so very, very far away. But he sat quietly—a minor miracle—and listened to the cadence of the old lady’s reed-thin voice as she talked about them. He didn’t understand much of what she said, because she mostly spoke Latvian to him, but he liked the sound.

It wasn’t until he was much older and the old lady had passed away that it struck Stiles how lonely she must have been, to let this weird little kid into her house every day.

His mom would always come and find him, and apologize to the old lady because he was bothering her, and the old lady would _tsk-tsk_ and say “No bother, he no bother!” in her broken, accented English.

Stiles always went back.

Sometimes, two of the slides got stuck, and made ghost images on top of one another. Dark eyed-people smiled out of the sheet in the wall, superimposed over bridges, or buildings, or other dark-eyed people.

Sometimes Stiles thinks that’s what his life is now.

At school, at lunch, he looks around the table in the cafeteria. He sees Lydia and Malia and Scott. He sees Liam and Hayden, and Corey and Mason. And then he blinks, and he sees Allison, and Isaac, and Erica and Boyd, and Kira. Even Jackson, that douchebag.

It’s like an itch at the back of his skull.

How the hell have they gone backwards?

These people here… they’re not _pack_.

They’re friends who orbit around one another loosely, but Stiles knows a single blow could scatter them in different directions.

Where’s the focus?

Where’s the _heart_?

 

***

 

John notices his distraction.

“You okay?” he asks that night at dinner.

“Yeah.” Stiles drags the vegetable steamer out of the microwave, and takes it apart. Carrots, and beans, and cauliflower and asparagus. It’s totally healthy, and will remain that way right up until his dad drowns it in white cheese sauce. Because his dad is hopeless. “Just, _ugh_.”

“You’re really working on those SAT words, huh?” his dad asks.

“You bet,” Stiles says, and wonders how old he has to be before he can safely flip his dad the bird in response. Really, he has a very small window of opportunity. Because his dad is just his dad right now, but soon he’ll be his dad _and_ his boss. That’s gonna be hella weird.

He stabs the steaks in the fry pan with a fork, and hooks them out onto plates. Then he adds the vegetables, and he and his dad sit at the kitchen table to eat.

“Seriously though,” John says.

“Yeah, seriously,” Stiles says, toying with a bean. “I’m okay, just a bit off, I guess. With everything that happened.”

“Do you need to talk to someone?” John asks.

Stiles raises his eyebrows, and uses his fork to gesture between them.

“I meant a professional,” his dad says, his tone even.

Stiles considers it for a moment, then wonders what the point would be. It’s not like he could be entirely truthful with a therapist or anything. “No, Dad. I’m okay, really. Just, it’s hard getting back to normal, you know?”

“I’m not sure that word means anything in this town,” John agrees.

“Yeah.” Smiles grins wryly.

“Do you need to adjust your meds?” John asks.

“I don’t think so.” Stiles shrugs. “I don’t think it’s that.”

John’s gaze is searching. “If you’re sure.”

Stiles nods.

“Whatever it is though, kid, promise me you won’t bottle it up, okay?” John’s mouth quirks in a smile that’s half-regretful. “You and me, we’ve had our fair share of trauma. And not just lately. Talk to me, okay?”

“Dad, I’m okay.”

“Okay,” John echoes. “And all I’m asking is that you talk to me.”

Stiles remembers the Nogitsune. He remembers how he’d wake up screaming, only to find his dad’s arms around him, his dad’s voice pushing the horror away, assuring him he was safe, he was okay, he was awake now. Neither of them want a repeat performance of that, Stiles knows.

“I feel restless, I guess,” Stiles tells him. “That’s all. Restless.”

“Okay,” John says. “I’m here for you, you know that right?”

“Yeah.” Stiles feels warmth uncurl in his belly. “Yeah, Dad. I know.”

His dad changes the subject then, and Stiles is relieved. John tells him about a few cases he’s working on. Now that Stiles is going to the academy to train to be a deputy, John’s happy to share stuff like this with him. Stiles likes it too. John treats him like a sounding board, like someone he knows he can trust to give him a fresh perspective.

“So, all the evidence points to the brother,” John says later as they’re doing the dishes. “And hell, we even have a confession, but I just don’t like it.”

“Means, motive and opportunity,” Stiles says. “You’ve got means and opportunity. Even with his confession, you’re pissed he hasn’t given you a motive. Why _would_ he be cashing his sister’s welfare check? The guy owns a car yard, right? And you subpoenaed the financial records?”

John gives him the side-eye. “It’s not my first day on the job, kiddo. And yes, he’s worth at least half a million in the clear.”

“So maybe he’s just an asshole?”

“Yeah.” John shakes his head. “Doesn’t feel like enough though.”

“No,” Stiles agrees.  

“I’m not saying it’s not an open and shut case,” John says. “Because it is. I’m just saying I don’t get it.”

Stiles huffs out a laugh. Yeah. That’s pretty much how he’s been feeling lately.

It’s not until much later, when he’s lying in bed on the soft verge of sleep that Stiles thinks maybe he didn’t use the right word when his dad asked if he was okay.

It’s not that he feels restless, exactly.

He feels _unanchored._

  

***

 

Now that he’s going to be a deputy, Stiles is on a fitness kick. Well, not so much a fitness kick as trying to get back to the same level of fitness as he was before he copped a massive piece of glass to his chest courtesy of the Desert Wolf. Sometimes his dad comes with him and they jog—very slowly—around one of the easier tracks in the Preserve. John’s trying to get his own fitness back too, and it’s slow work.

It was a hell of a summer.

Sometimes though, Stiles goes alone and runs. He sometimes comes across other joggers. Most of them wear proper lycra running gear and iPods. Stiles refuses to wear an iPod when he runs. This is Beacon Hills. He’d like to know if something’s chasing him, thanks. And lycra? Just no.

He always carries a backpack when he runs. It probably passes for resistance training or something. That’s a thing right? Where people put bricks in the backpacks like they’re training for Everest or the Navy Seals or something? Stiles’s backpack contains his water bottle, because hydration is important. It also contains a jar of mountain ash, a knife, a taser and an expandable baton, because keeping his guts inside his body is also important.

Stiles isn’t one of those people who can clear his mind when he runs. Hell, Stiles can never clear his mind. It’s cluttered and busy, just how he likes it. Still, for someone who prides himself on seeing patterns, it takes him a little while to realize that whenever he’s running on his own, he always ends up at the site of the Hale house.

Drawn like a magnet.

The house is gone now. The fire destroyed most of it, of course, and the bones of it have been cleared by the county. Stiles can still see them though. Can still see Derek Hale lurking in the ruins like some sort of brooding Byronic hero.

Unfair.

Derek wasn’t brooding. He was mourning, and he was afraid, and he was lonely, and Stiles had been so caught up in his _holy-fuck-werewolves-are-real!_ epiphany that it had taken him a long time to realize that.

And even longer to realize that Peter Hale was exactly the same. Sure, in Peter it had manifested in a much more horrific way, but…

Well, Stiles doesn’t condone it, but he does understand it.

What he doesn’t understand is why Deucalion got a free pass from Scott, and Peter didn’t.

It rankles.

Stiles drops down onto his haunches and regards the clearing for a while. The woods are slowly encroaching on the place where the Hale house once stood. The grass is already growing over the earth where the foundations once stood. Stiles wonders if the basement and tunnels are still intact underneath, or if they’ve been filled in.

He closes his eyes for a moment, and breathes in the scent of the woods: pine, and loam, and petrichor. It’s sweet and heady. Soothing.

He opens his eyes again, just as a crow cuts through the patch of blue sky above the clearing.

 _This,_ he thinks. _This should be the heart._

 

***

 

Stiles dreams of the Hale house that night. In his dream it’s not an empty space. It’s not a charred ruin. In his dream it’s whole, and full of light. Stiles can hear laughter as he walks from room to room, and it makes him smile.

Claws click on the floorboards beside him.

Stiles doesn’t look down, but he tugs his right hand from the pocket of his jeans and lets it hang. A damp, cold nose presses into his palm.

The dream is vivid.

The house smells of pumpkin spice and cinnamon.

Stiles can see the grain in the wood panels on the walls.

He can read the titles of the books on the shelves.

Little feet thump down the stairs, and Stiles hears laughter again.

He looks down at the wolf and finds it looking back at him. Its eyes are pale, a touch more yellow than brown. Stiles curls his fingers around a twitching ear, and tugs gently.

The wolf huffs at him.

Stiles knows it’s a dream.

He knows that if he tried to count his fingers he wouldn’t be able to do it.

But that’s okay.

It’s nice here.

The wolf’s tail swings back and forth lazily, as though it agrees.


	2. Chapter 2

Eichen House is hell.

Still, Peter Hale has survived hell before.

It may, in fact, be the only thing he’s good at.

Objectively, the coma was worse. It’s hard to remember that though, when he burns with low-level wolfsbane poisoning, day in and day out. When even the mildest dose rips through his veins like fire. They use it to keep him weak, keep him docile, but they underestimate him. Unlike most of the other creatures in this basement wing, Peter’s not a drugged-out zombie. Not quite. He has moments every day when he’s almost completely lucid. And, when he’s not, he retreats deep inside his own mind, just like he did during the coma.

The wolfsbane might keep him from shifting, keep him from controlling his own limbs, but the wolf runs free in his mind.

His body only limits it if he lets it.

The cage only exists if he believes it.

So, here he is again, bounded in a nutshell, and a king of infinite space.

 

 

***

 

Lydia Martin was so beautiful and sweet and _ripe_. Pale and soft and red-haired, like a Pre-Raphaelite vision of glory.

Peter wore a mask for her. Smiled gently while he drove sharp nails into her mind to fix himself there. All of Lydia’s jagged edges softened when Peter pressed himself against her. A child, really. Easily manipulated in the end, and twisted to his purpose.

Peter taught her exactly how easy her psychic defenses were to breach.

She never even thanked him.

 

***

 

There is a routine in Eichen House. Each morning, Peter stirs awake when he hears the sound of the key in the locked door at the end of the wing. He’s not the only one. The cells in Eichen are positioned so that Peter can’t see anything apart from the wall opposite, but he can hear the other inmates. He can smell them.

He’s not the only werewolf in the wing, although the other wolf’s scent is unfamiliar to him. Some rogue omega, perhaps, who managed to get himself sent here instead of sent straight to hell by a hunter. There’s also a wendigo, Peter is certain, by the pervading scent of death and decay that drifts down from the eastern end of the corridor. Peter’s glad it’s not close. The stench would be unbearable otherwise. There’s _something_ in the cell next to Peter’s. He sometimes hears the scratch of claws on the ground, but the creature has no discernable scent of its own. It hums sometimes, in a high-pitched tuneless manner, but there are worse neighbors. Like the ghoul who is in the cell closest to the door, and starts wailing and gnashing as soon as the key turns in the lock.

Peter doesn’t wail or gnash. He’s compliant, because compliance brings rewards. Like not getting tasered whenever the orderlies need to change his bedding. And really, what’s the point in fighting? The wolfsbane keeps him weak and unable to shift.

The orderlies are the only other people that Peter ever sees. He sees them first in the morning when they arrive with breakfast and a fresh syringe of wolfsbane. He sees them again ten hours later when they bring his dinner.

His compliance has brought him more rewards than freedom from torture, of course. He has a few dog-eared paperbacks that the orderlies have brought him, and a crossword book and a pencil stub. The pencil is too short to use as a decent weapon, and each day Peter painstakingly sharpens the lead by scraping it against the concrete floor. He idly thinks about driving it into the throat of one of the orderlies, but it’s not just his own weakness that prevents him from doing it.

It’s risk versus reward.

He can’t kill them both with the pencil and, if he kills one of them, it’s very unlikely that the dead man’s colleague will feel disposed to bringing him more crossword books.

Peter knows when he’s beaten.

It amuses him a little, when he thinks of it. The fire couldn’t kill him and the grave couldn’t hold him, but _now_ he’s beaten? By mild wolfsbane poisoning and locked doors? Peter’s not sure he was ever mighty, but he’s certainly fallen.

The lights in Eichen House are dimmed during what Peter can only assume is night, but there’s no way to tell for certain. He can barely even feel the pull of the moon down here in the bowels of the earth, with wolfsbane burning through his veins.

Instead he listens to the sounds of the creaking pipes, of the footsteps of the orderlies who patrol the corridors at night, and of the growls and groans of his fellow inmates, each of them locked in their own version of hell.

In the beginning, Peter had thought that Derek at least would come and visit. To glower, or gloat, or just glare at him in that half-murderous half-betrayed manner that only Derek can manage. But he’s had no visitors. He doesn’t know if it’s because it’s not allowed, or because Derek has washed his hands of him once and for all. Peter likes to think it’s the first reason, but that’s probably a delusion.

He’s not sure how long he’s been here.

He tries to sleep a lot, to escape into his memories of his life before the fire, or into his dreams.

To lose himself for as long as he can in infinite space.

 

***

 

In his dreams, Stiles smells like fresh-cut grass and rain on hot asphalt. In his dreams, Stiles is quiet and contemplative, and so unlike the boy that Peter remembers.

Peter walks beside him through strange places. Some of them, he knows. The house, the Preserve, the main street of Beacon Hills. He doesn’t know if his mind has conjured them, or Stiles’s has. It’s different than with Lydia. Symbiotic rather than parasitic. And Peter didn’t engineer this. Not this time.

Perhaps it’s not even real. It may just be a dream fever induced by the wolfsbane. It may just be Peter’s sanity crumbling again as he’s once more trapped in the confines of a body riding a wave of unending pain.

Some of the places they walk are unknown to Peter. Some of the faces he sees are. But Peter is always there, always beside Stiles, and he is alert but not afraid. When Stiles cards his fingers through his fur, Peter feels the warmth linger for a long time afterward.

 

***

 

“Hale,” Penrose says as he opens the door to Peter’s cell.

Penrose is a short man, but solid. Balding and usually damp with sweat. He enters the cell while Musgrave stands just in the entry, taser at the ready.

It’s nice, Peter feels, to be reminded that he’s still a predator. He could really use the ego boost, given that he can’t even pop his claws nowadays. He can barely lever himself off his mattress.

Peter sits on his bed, and extends his arm for the syringe.

He knows the drill.

The first burn of fresh wolfsbane is always sharp. It makes his muscles constrict, and his breath catch in his throat. It recedes a little after that, but never entirely leaves him. Once they overdosed him. He’s not entirely sure it was an accident. It was possibly a warning. It left him convulsing on the floor for hours, retching black bile.

He’d been ill for days afterward.

Penrose pockets the empty syringe, then steps back into the doorway.

It’s Musgrave’s turn. He enters the cell and sets the tray down on the end of the bed.

Peter swipes his tongue over his dry lips. “Any chance of a new paperback?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Musgrave says.

Peter’s lost count, but he thinks it’s the sixth day in a row Musgrave has said that.

He only nods slightly, and watches as they close the door again and move onto the next cell.

He thinks they might be testing him. Trying to see if they can rile him, as though there’s still anger coursing through his veins, and not just poison. Not just weakness and lethargy.

But perhaps they’re also just humoring him.

It’s so very difficult to tell.

Peter knows he was smarter once, sharper. He knows he could think his way out of a thousand thorny situations. Could work pack politics and intrigue like it was a Byzantine maze and he was the only one holding a map. Now he’s dull and weak and tired.

It was never supposed to end like this for him.

Except, of course, when he’d known it would.

Peter had made his choice with his eyes wide open.

At least he’s too tired to stew in regret.

 

***

 

At night, when it’s quiet, Peter thinks he can hear the humans upstairs. Hear their murmuring heartbeats, as indistinct as a distant ocean. It’s probably his imagination. Sometimes Penrose and Musgrave smell of their human patients. Of their human patients’ despair and misery. There’s a particular piquant flavor that lingers in the scent of the seriously disturbed. They’re so often flooded with adrenaline as they fight off all those imaginary bugs crawling on their skin, or scream back at the voices in their heads.

One day, Peter catches a familiar scent on Musgrave’s scrubs.

 _Lydia_.

It shocks him even through his wolfsbane-induced lassitude. The stab of guilt he feels shocks him even more. If Lydia is fragile enough to be sent to Eichen, then Peter knows it’s partly his fault. He exploited her. Cracked her psyche wide open, and who knows what else crawled in?

Peter worries that one day Malia might find herself back here in Eichen too.

Jesus.

Malia.

Something like guilt twists his guts when he thinks of her. Yet, he’s blameless. He probably would have been a terrible father, all things considered, but nobody can ever know that for certain. Talia stole his memories of his daughter. Dug her claws so deep into his mind that not a flash of an infant’s wail remained, not a whiff of talcum. Still, even though Peter can’t _feel_ the loss, the knowledge of it creates enough of an empty space inside him. Enough of an empty space that Peter can imagine the faint hint of an echo inside. The instinct of the wolf is to protect his pack, but Malia is pack in name only. Any connection they ever felt was severed by Talia.

Strange.

He should hate his sister for that, he supposes. But then, Talia died listening to the screams of her children as they burned. Peter should probably be thankful she stole Malia and the memory of her from him. At least this way Malia got to live.

Peter is interested in his daughter, he supposes, in an academic sort of way. Interested enough to hope she continues to live, and even that she thrives. But he can’t manufacture a sense of paternal love for her purely out of obligation.

He’s tried, he supposes. Tried to feel for her even the faintest stirrings of what he felt for the child whose heartbeat he listened to at night, his head resting on Allegra’s huge belly. Allegra had been eight months pregnant when she died in the fire. Their child never even took a breath.

Better that, Peter supposes, than choking to death on smoke.

That’s fatherhood, for Peter. Nothing but unfulfilled promise. Nothing but a child he can’t remember holding, and one he never got the chance to hold.

Just another thing stolen from him.

Still, he wishes Malia well enough to hope she doesn’t end up back in Eichen House.

Stiles, too, he supposes, although a part of Peter aches to catch his scent again.

 

***

 

A few days later Musgrave slaps a paperback down on the end of his bed with his breakfast tray.

“Thank you,” Peter says dully.

He takes the book and clutches it to his chest as he rides the burn of the wolfsbane poisoning. Later, when he’s well enough to sit again, he eats his now cold and congealed oatmeal, and flips through the book.

It’s the sort of generic thriller that could grace the stands at an airport bookstore. Terrorists, a misplaced nuclear warhead—seriously, does nobody ever put those things behind lock and key?—a hero who doesn’t play by the rules, and a heroine who has no apparent purpose but to be aggressively fucked by the hero. The whole thing is the typical masturbatory fantasy of inadequate males the world over.

Of course Peter will read it though. What the hell else has he got to do? He’ll read it even though he burns, even though he’s barely strong enough to remain conscious, even though it might take him hours to get through a single page, and it’s impossible to hold onto the words he just read.

They peel away like flakes of dry paint, and turn to dust.

They crumble like ashes.

Everything, it seems, is ashes in the end.

The library in the house, and the books it held. The furniture his grandfather made. The curtains that fluttered in the windows. The things he knew, and the people he did. Window frames and pairs of scuffed shoes and dark eyes bright with laughter. Every tiny piece that came together to make up his world. All ashes.

Peter’s entire life is ashes.

 

***

 

From the time he was a child, Peter had known he would never be alpha. He was trained differently. He was trained to be Talia’s left hand, her knife in the dark. Talia though, always leaned more toward diplomacy than intrigue. She treated Peter like an anachronism, some vaguely distasteful relic of a more barbarous age. She’d never known how much she’d needed him. The lengths he would have gone to protect the pack if only she’d let him off his leash.

When he woke from the coma, Peter was mad with loss and grief. His pack was gone. His _purpose_ was gone. And Laura… Laura was too much like her mother. Too ready to talk, to concede, and never ready to attack. Peter needed his revenge like he needed the moonlight, and Laura would never have let him have it.

He killed her. Took her alpha power because he _would_ have the revenge he was owed.

Laura couldn’t stop him.

Derek couldn’t.

But a skinny high school kid with terrible fashion sense, an unfortunate buzzcut, and a Molotov cocktail could. And he did.

And Peter had been glad, in a way.

He’d gone too far too fast. He’d lost all control. The left hand was never supposed to be the alpha.

_Yes._

_Yes,_ as Peter had succumbed yet again to agonizing burns, as Derek had crouched over him and torn his throat out, Peter had thought _Yes. Yes, feral dogs are put down just like this._

 

***

And still he came back, this time from the grave.

Derek was the alpha now.

And for just a little while, Peter could breathe again.

 


	3. Chapter 3

It’s the third week of school when the attacks start.

Stiles is in the drive through at Burger King when his dad calls him.

“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”

“Got a body out on Southman Road. The Robinson place. You wanna come take a look?”

Any satisfaction Stiles might feel at finally being in a place where his dad knows he can share stuff like this—where he can _trust_ him with stuff like this—is drowned out by the cold wave of trepidation that washes through him.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll be there in about thirty.”

 

***

 

Southman Road cuts through the eastern corner of the Preserve. It’s a fair way out of town, close to the county line. Stiles remembers the Robinson place because when he was a kid he and his parents used to drive out here all the time. A few miles past the Robinson place, across the county line, is Harry Gruberman’s farm. Every summer they’d swing by a few times and buy boxes of tomatoes, and beets with clumps of dirt still stuck to them, and radishes and cabbages straight from the packing shed. All cash in hand and tax free, but what the IRS didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, right? Stiles remembers that Harry Gruberman was really old, his spine twisted up like a pretzel, and he used a pair of walking sticks. It was difficult for him to get around, so he just used to sit on his front porch and yell instructions at his sons. He still made it into Beacon Hills for Stiles’s mom’s funeral though.

Stiles remembers sitting in the back of the car, bouncing with excitement as they drove along Southman Road, like going to buy vegetables with his parents was a trip to Disneyland or something. Except it almost was. It was fun, and they sang along to the stereo, and always stopped for milkshakes on the way home.

Stiles used to count the mailboxes all the way along Southman Road. They’re the sort of mailboxes that have family names painted on them, or hanging by little signs. The Robinsons’ mailbox, if they haven’t changed it in the last decade, is made out of an old gas can, and painted red.

Stiles slows down as he approaches it, then turns on the dirt road that leads up to the house. The road is narrow, and curves a little. It’s shrouded by trees. Stiles follows the curve of it, the Jeep bouncing along the ruts in the dirt, and brakes as the trees suddenly open up into a clearing.

There’s a house, with two police cruisers and an ambulance parked out front.

Well, Stiles guesses he got the right address.

He parks the Jeep next to his dad’s cruiser and opens the door. His shoes crunch on the dirt. He wipes his hands on his jeans and inhales.

Weird.

He’s seen a lot of gruesome stuff, but this is the first time he’s officially been invited to inspect a crime scene. He wonders how his dad is going to explain it to everyone else already there, because this is a little different than taking him on a ride-along, right?

He heads to the house. The porch steps groan and creak as he climbs them.

The front door is open, leading into a corridor. It’s dark after the sunlight outside. Stiles walks slowly down the corridor. There are framed photographs on the wall that he can’t properly make out. The figures in them are just dark shapes. By the time Stiles reaches the back of the house, where he can hear people moving around, his eyes have adjusted more.

The back room is the kitchen.

Parrish and a paramedic are crouching over a body lying on the floor. It’s a middle-aged man. His pale face is frozen in an ugly mask of shock, his skin stained with spurts of blood. There’s a lot of blood. It’s all over the floor, all over the guy’s clothes.

John is standing by the kitchen sink, his head bowed.

“Dad?” Stiles asks awkwardly.

John turns. “Stiles. Come in. Watch where you step though, kiddo.”

“Yeah.” Stiles moves carefully around the edges of the walls and makes his way toward his dad. “So, um, animal attack?”

The paramedic snorts.

Parrish flashes a quick smile at Stiles, then stands up. “Come on, Frazer. I’ll see you out.”

Stiles waits until they’re gone.

Now he can see the body more clearly. The man’s throat has been torn open. Yeah, Stiles is kind of an expert on that, okay? And… holy shit. There’s a gaping cavity in his chest where his heart should be.

“Fu— _udge_ ,” he says, which is an incredible save. “Did something steal his _heart_? That’s gonna be hard to pin on a mountain lion. And the paramedic’s gonna tell everyone, isn’t he?”

“Don’t worry about Frazer. I’ll handle him,” John says.

“Okay.” Stiles edges closer to his dad. “So it has to be supernatural, right? Because that’s weirdly more comforting than thinking some human psycho could have done this. Okay, so what kind of monster rips the heart out? And then what? Eats it, probably. Ugh, gross.”

“It didn’t eat the heart, Stiles,” John says, and nods at the sink.

Stiles looks down.

There, dropped between a crumb-sprinkled plate and a chipped coffee mug, lies Mr. Robinson’s bloody heart.

Well then.

That just seems unnecessary.

 

***

 

When it comes to pack meetings, Stiles misses using Derek’s loft. Okay, so it had a hole in the wall and a not insignificant bug problem, but there’s something a little wrong about pulling out pictures of Mr. Robinson’s bloody chest cavity in Scott’s living room.

“Oh, that’s gross!” Corey exclaims, and screws his face up.

“Ew,” Hayden says under her breath, and Liam takes the opportunity to throw his arm around her comfortingly. Obvious Liam is obvious.

Only Scott and Lydia seem to be actually paying attention.

Mason, who Stiles can usually rely on to bring half a brain to these pack meetings, is grinning and taking a photo of Corey’s horrified expression.

Malia meets Stiles’s gaze and rolls her eyes.

“Okay, _children_ ,” Stiles says, only half-sarcastically. “Can we concentrate, please?”

And _he’s_ the one with ADD.

He runs the pack through the crime scene.

“Okay, but we can be sure it wasn’t an animal attack?” Corey asks hopefully.

“Yes, Corey,” Stiles says. “It removed the heart and _left it in the sink_.”

“Standard boring Hannibal Lector type?” Lydia asks, playing devil’s advocate.

“Standard?” Stiles asks. “Boring?”

“Well, this is Beacon Hills,” she tells him with a flash of the quick, sharp smile that’s been so slow to reappear since the summer. “Boring is relative. A psychopathic serial killer would make a nice change of pace.”

“Definitely claw marks though,” Stiles tells her, handing the picture over so she can see for herself. She takes it without flinching. “Not a knife.”

Lydia inspects the pictures and nods.

“Okay,” Scott says at last. “So, we can patrol out that way, and see what we turn up. And Stiles, you’ll let us know if your dad finds anything?”

Stiles nods.

“Okay,” Scott says again with that air of easy authority that the betas respond to, and just like that the pack meeting’s done.

 

 

***

 

“My underage son is stealing my beer _and_ drinking alone,” John says, sitting down on the couch beside Stiles. “I’m not sure which is worse.”

“Well, you’re here now, so the second one isn’t true anymore.”

His dad opens his own beer. “Nobody else here?”

“Malia can’t get drunk, and you’ll be shocked to learn that sitting here in the dark drinking cheap domestic beer wasn’t high on Lydia’s favorite ways to spend a Saturday night.”

“And what about Scott?” John asks. He keeps his tone light, but Stiles can tell he knows he’s hit a touchy subject.

“Patrolling,” Stiles says. “Training the newbies. Whatever.”

“He say anything about the bodies?”

“No.” Stiles sighs and drags his fingers through his hair. He wants a subject change. “Did you ever figure out why that guy was stealing his sister’s social security?”

John huffs out a rueful laugh. “No. And it’s not exactly at the top of my list right now, you know?”

“Yeah.” Stiles crunches his empty beer can and stands. He stretches. “Okay, I’m gonna head to bed.”

“Good night, son,” John says, and waits until he’s at the door. “Oh, Stiles?”

“Yeah?”

“You owe me a six pack of beer.”

“I had _one_!”

“And you owe me six,” John tells him. “Consider it a bribe for not writing you up. Next time you want to steal one, you might want to do a cost analysis first.”

“I’ll stick to soda,” Stiles tells him.

“That’s my boy.”

Stiles’s grin fades as he heads upstairs.

Scott doesn’t trust him. He hasn’t, not really, since everything with Theo and Donovan. And Stiles was right about Theo. And he was right to kill Donovan. It’s not like he planned it. It was self-defense.

It’s the deal Scott made with Deucalion that really rankles. Scott had made the deal behind Stiles’s back, because Stiles never would have agreed to it. Deucalion killed Erica and Boyd—well, Derek killed Boyd, because the Alpha Pack fucking forced him to do it. And Stiles had never seen anything so horrific in his life. Never seen anything so unforgivable.

So no. Stiles would never have made a deal with Deucalion. Well, he might have made a deal, then double-crossed him and killed him when it was done.

Stiles closes his bedroom door and climbs onto his bed. He folds his arms behind his head and stares at the ceiling.

Scott’s got this thing where he tries too hard to be good, even when it causes him to make some really shitty decisions. Because being good isn’t the same as being _right_ , and how can Scott not know that by now?

Stiles has no fucking idea anymore how Scott’s moral compass works. Or his own, probably. He only knows that they’re setting them on very different coordinates.

Stiles loves Scott like a brother, and he always will, but so often these days he doesn’t _understand_ him.

How could Scott forgive Stiles for Allison, but not for Donovan?

How could he make a deal with Deucalion, and shove Peter inside Eichen? Deucalion has the blood of more of their friends on his hands than Peter does. Peter could have killed Kira. Could have killed Chris Argent. He could have killed Stiles, every time they were alone together researching. But he hadn’t.

It doesn’t make any _sense_.

Nothing makes any sense.

Stiles groans and blinks, and finds himself thinking of Mr. Robinson’s gaping chest cavity.

It’s not even about Mr. Robinson. It’s about the fact that Stiles was given a thirty-second window of opportunity to share his information at the pack meeting, and Scott treated everything like it was no big deal, when Stiles knows it is.

He can _feel_ it.

There was a time, not that long ago, when that would have meant something to Scott.

“This is a bad thing,” he mutters. “And Scott’s all like, okay, whatevs, we’ll patrol, like it’s no big deal. His heart was in the fucking _sink_!”

Scott doesn’t listen to him anymore, Stiles doesn’t understand his best friend, and nothing at all makes sense.

 

***

 

Stiles knows he’s dreaming. He’s walking down the corridor in Mr. Robinson’s house. He can see all the framed photographs on the wall, and they’re the pack. There’s a photograph of Isaac. One of Allison. Boyd and Erica, arms around one another. Jackson, in his lacrosse gear. Kira with her katana. Derek. Even Peter.

He drops his hand to the wolf’s ruff.

Mr. Robinson is lying on the kitchen floor, just like Stiles remembers. Except he’s not dead, somehow. His throat has been torn open and his heart is in the kitchen sink, but he’s alive. He turns his head to look at Stiles.

“Sorry,” Stiles says.

Mr. Robinson blinks at him, and opens and closes his mouth.

“Sorry,” Stiles says again.

The wolf presses his nose into his hand.

Stiles turns and walks away.

 

***

 

On Wednesday two dogs on Latimer road are found with their hearts torn out. Their hearts are found in the closest mailbox.

On the weekend, hunters find a mutilated deer in the Preserve. Its heart has been shoved in its mouth.

The following Friday night, another body is found. This time it’s north of town. Stiles hears it on his police scanner, and jumps in his Jeep to head out to the crime scene. His phone rings before he’s even made it to the end of the street.

“Hey, Dad,” he says.

“Tell me you’re not on your way out here.”

“I might have heard it on the scanner that I absolutely do not have,” Stiles tells him.

“No,” John says firmly. “Do _not_ come out here, Stiles.”

“What? Why?”

He hears the heartbreak in his dad’s voice. “It’s a kid, Stiles. She’s _nine_.”

Stiles’s stomach clenches and a wave of nausea rises in his throat.

“Go home,” John says firmly. “Please, Stiles, go home.”

“Okay.” Stiles swallows. “Okay, Dad.”

 

***

 

Stiles stares at the map of Beacon County pinned to the board in his room as he waits for his dad to get home. The animal murders are represented by blue pins. Humans are red. Stiles can’t see a pattern, but he knows there has to be one. There is _always_ a pattern. And if he can only see it, then maybe he can predict where the next killing will take place.

He takes an Adderall, and then another one.

Stares at the fucking board for what feels like hours. Maybe it is.

He falls asleep, and wakes up again with a stiff neck. He stands up and paces in front of the board, rolling his shoulders. He picks up a ball of red string from his desk, and makes a loop in the end of it. Hooks it around one of the pins.

If he can’t see the pattern, maybe he can try and make his own.

When his mom was in the hospital, one of the volunteers showed him how to knit using a cotton reel with nails in it. Stiles didn’t have the attention span to make anything more than knitted snakes, but he used to have fun winding the wool around and around the nails, then tugging it through the bottom of the reel. And his mom used to smile whenever he brought her a new snake to put on her pillow. When she was lucid, anyway.

Stiles works, lost in memory. Falls too easily into something like a trance. Too much Adderall. It feels almost like an out-of-body experience. Like when Deaton tried to teach him to use his spark, or when—

When the nogitsune possessed him.

That realization comes with a sharp intake of breath and a sudden jolt back into the here and now.

Stiles holds his breath while his racing heart settles, and then looks at what he’s made.

It’s like some sort of interlocking triangles or something. Stiles doesn’t even remember jamming the yellow pin in the middle of Beacon Hills, but that’s the piece that holds it all together.

Then he looks closer.

No.

The yellow pin is a little way outside of town.

It’s in the Preserve.

It’s the site where the Hale house once stood.

 

***

 

Stiles breaks more than one traffic law getting to the animal clinic in record time, and then breaks all the rules of polite society when he pushes in front of a lady with a sick cat and insists he needs to see Deaton _now_.

The woman looks him up and down, and Stiles thinks he probably should have brought a dog or something for cover.

“I’ll just be a few minutes, Mrs. Lewis,” Deaton assures her smoothly, and ushers Stiles out into the back room.

When he’s there, Stiles brings the picture of the map up on his phone. “What do you make of this? Bearing in mind that every point on the map is a killing.”

Deaton frowns at the screen. “It’s a [valknut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valknut).”

“Yeah, I got that from Google,” Stiles says. “What does it _mean_?”

“I’m not sure,” Deaton says. “It’s related to the triskele.”

“The Hales,” Stiles says.

“But I don’t know what it signifies,” Deaton tells him. “I’m not sure I’ve ever come across it except in mythology. I’ll look, of course, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to give you any definite answers.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, chewing his lower lip. “Do you know anyone who could?”

 

***

 

It’s the middle of the night when Stiles dials the number he hasn’t dialed in months. There’s no answer. He doesn’t expect one. He waits until the call diverts to the message bank, and takes a deep breath. “Hey, Derek. It’s Stiles. Just thought you should know that I’m planning on breaking Peter out of Eichen House. So, um, I don’t know if that’s something you want to help me with, but hey, I can always use an extra pair of claws or whatever. So, you should probably call me back or something.”

He ends the call, cradles his phone against his chest, and blinks up at the ceiling. He thinks about Scott, and about that old saying of it being better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Of course, he’s not sure Scott’s forgiveness is something he can rely on anymore.

Doesn’t matter. Stiles knows what has to be done, and there’s no going back now.

Okay.

So.

Time to plan shit.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Peter’s vision as the wolf is monochromatic. Not black and white as much as sepia-toned, as though everything he sees belongs to some forgotten world, some past age. He relies more on scent than on vision in this form.

Stiles smells of fast food and hair gel. Of pine needles and laundry soap. Of Adderall and coffee. He smells of a hundred different scents that all combine into something uniquely Stiles.

Peter walks beside him along a road in the Preserve. A dirt road. Not much more than a fire trail.

The dream is vivid. Peter can smell the stench of a vixen’s musk in the cool night air. The coppery, earthy tang of a warm, trembling rabbit. Rotting leaves and fresh water. Stale smoke and damp, rich loam.

Stiles stares into the woods and dances his fingers over Peter’s head, and Peter’s ears twitch and flicker at the unsatisfyingly light touch. He turns his head and nips at Stiles’s fingers. Huffs a hot breath out into the palm of Stiles’s hand.

Stiles grins down at him, and then drops down onto his haunches. He reaches out for a thin stick, and twists it in his long, narrow fingers for a while.

Peter sits and watches intently as Stiles traces a pattern in the dirt. He tilts his head on an angle as a triangle appears. Another straight line, and Peter feels a sudden chill as Stiles coaxes the valknut into existence. Peter’s hackles rise, and he growls.

Stiles meets his gaze.

Peter’s growl lengthens, deepens. He curls his lip back.

“Settle down, wolf,” Stiles tells him, eyes widening, breath catching.

Peter can’t stop the growl from reverberating through him. Can’t stop the need to rip and tear and rend from rising up within him. Can’t stop and tell Stiles that the growl isn’t meant to scare him at all. It’s meant to scare whatever else is out there listening. Whatever else is coming.

 

***

Time passes.

Peter hides in his memories. Not those before the fire. He’s not strong enough to take refuge in those. Instead he thinks of Derek’s loft, and of the parade of annoying teenagers who had cycled through it. Well, he told himself at the time they were annoying, but he actually found them amusing for the most part. Diverting. Silly little puppies.

He tries not to think of Erica and Boyd. He barely knew them, but they were still pack. He shoves them to the corner of his mind where he keeps his family, his ghosts. Even the Argent girl is there sometimes, smiling her dimpled smile like she doesn’t realize she’s an interloper. She has a sweet smile though, so Peter lets her stay.

Peter thinks of the living instead.

He thinks of Derek and Malia and Cora. Family and pack.

He thinks of Scott, once his unwilling beta and now a True Alpha.

He thinks of Isaac, and wonders if he is still safe in France.

He thinks of Chris Argent, and John Stilinski, both men touched by tragedy, but shaped by it in very different ways.

Mostly he thinks of Stiles, who never did slot easily into the pack hierarchy. Too loud, too smart, too _frenetic_ to follow the rules. Too fucking opinionated, about _everything_ , and so very unafraid of sharing that. A nuisance. An irritant. A pebble in a shoe.

And yet somehow, whenever Peter thinks of pack, he always thinks of Stiles first.

 

***

 

It’s late when Peter hears the doors at the end of the corridor opening, and the wraith begins to gnash and wail. It’s the middle of the night, Peter guesses. Still a few hours until breakfast, until his next syringe. Peter feels almost lucid. He’s almost free of pain as well. The wolfsbane poisoning is a dull burn in his veins. He’s weak still, but he can almost clench a fist and hold it. That’s what he’s been reduced to, apparently. Considering basic motor functions some sort of major victory.

Peter lies in his cot and listens as the orderlies drag the newest inmate down the corridor. Peter hears the low grunts as the inmate struggles. He turns his head to look at the door, wondering if he’ll catch a glimpse of his new neighbor, but no. The orderlies stop before they reach Peter’s cell.

What Peter catches, instead, is a _scent_. It hits him like something solid. It makes his chest constrict. It’s familiar, and it’s awful and terrible and wonderful.

Werewolf.

Pack.

_Derek!_

Derek.

God, it’s Derek.

Peter tries to lift himself from his cot, but can’t quite manage it. He slumps back again, hating his weakness, desperate to claw his way to his nephew, as impossible as that would be.

He hears Derek snarl, and tries to answer. Then he hears the click and buzz of a taser, the sound of Derek slumping to the ground, and his hurt, broken whining. Moments later the door to the nearby cell is shut, and the orderlies walk back toward the exit.

“Derek,” Peter whispers, but if Derek hears him, he is incapable of answering.

Peter closes his eyes and wonders if this is another dream, or some aconite-induced hallucination. But Derek’s scent, even though it’s faint, is unmistakable. Peter knows it as well as he knows his own.

He rolls onto his side with difficulty.

That’s when he hears the faint sounds of retching, like a cat trying to hack up a hairball. He thinks immediately of aconite poisoning, of black fluid being vomited up in the final stages before inevitable death, and wonders if Derek was shot before they brought him in.

“Derek?” he whispers into the darkness, but only the silence answers him.

The silence, and then the snick and beep of a disengaging magnetic lock.

Then footsteps, and Derek’s familiar glowering face staring at him through his door.

“Impossible,” Peter whispers.

Derek holds up a keycard, his glower transforming into a smirk. He slides the card through the lock on Peter’s door, and the door swings open.

“Impossible,” Peter whispers again.

“Stiles made me swallow it,” Derek says. His expression transforms into something like pity as he looks down at Peter. He holds out his hand. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?”

Oh yes.

Peter doesn’t doubt it now.

He is absolutely dreaming.

 

***

 

The keycards open the cells, but they don’t open the door at the end of the corridor. Chris Argent opens that, and for a moment Peter is so shocked he can’t even process what he’s seeing. The last time he saw Chris was when he was jamming a pipe though the man’s gut. He can’t imagine what the hell brought him here tonight.

Although perhaps it’s not such a mystery after all.

Stiles is on Chris’s other side, a taser in one hand and his trusty baseball bat in the other. He’s shifting from foot to foot like an excited kid, but the expression on his face belongs to someone much older. Someone hardened, and ready to kill. It’s a fascinating, unsettling juxtaposition.

“Peter,” Stiles says. “You look like shit! Let’s get the hell out of here before—”

The alarms sound, right on cue.

 

***

 

If there’s a fight, Peter misses it.

He’s too weak, too dozy to anything except lean heavily against Stiles while Derek and Chris clear a path to the exit.

When they finally stumble outside, Chris’s SUV is waiting for them, with Malia in the driver’s seat.

She drives like a fucking maniac.

Peter slumps in the back between Derek and Stiles and wonders what the odds are that this is actually real.

“Thank you,” he murmurs to Derek. “Thank you for coming back for me.”

Derek’s expression is half-angry, half-pitying, as though he doesn’t even know himself how he feels. When he speaks, his voice is soft, the words hard to catch. “I didn’t come back for you, Peter.”

Of course he didn’t. Of course he was happy to let Peter rot in Eichen, but as soon as Stiles asked for his help he came running back like an eager puppy. Of course blood isn’t thicker than water. Not their blood. Not anymore.

Peter tries not to let that sting.

It doesn’t matter why he came back, it only matters that he did.

Everything else is a work in progress.

 

 

***

 

It takes days to rid his system of enough wolfsbane so that Peter is even aware of his surroundings. Days that Peter spends huddled in Derek’s bed in the loft, while Derek brings him water and cleans him up while he sweats it out. Or vomits it out. Peter’s not proud of that. He’s also not proud of letting his nephew strip him down and manhandle him into the shower but, frankly, it’s a battle he’ll have with his ego another day, because it feels too fucking nice to be clean and finally start to get the stench of Eichen House out of his skin.

He’s aware of people in the loft. Stiles, and Malia, mostly. Argent, once, and Deaton. Never Scott though. Never the alpha. He’s a little unsettled by that. While his wolf never truly accepted Scott as his alpha, the suspicion that his escape from Eichen is a secret is troublesome. Not troublesome enough that Peter is prepared to go back there though.

Fuck no.

On the third day Peter wakes well enough to shower himself, although his hand shakes enough that he cuts himself shaving more than once, and then he dresses in some of Derek’s clothes and climbs down the stairs. His senses are still out of kilter enough that he’s surprised when he discovers it’s not Derek in the kitchen brewing coffee, but Stiles.

It is incongruous. Unexpected. Peter’s not sharp enough yet to know what to make of Stiles’s presence here. He’s so used to seeing Stiles in his dreams that seeing him now seems somehow contrary. Somehow unreal.

“Good morning,” Peter says, and finds that his voice is gravelly from disuse.

“It’s actually afternoon,” Stiles says, raising his eyebrows. “But close enough. Coffee?”

“Please.” Peter sits down at a stool at the counter and watches as Stiles fiddles with the coffee machine. He imagines those long fingers curling in his ruff, the way they do in his dreams, and wonders if he’ll still dream about Stiles now that the wolfsbane is out of his system or if the dreams were nothing more than a symptom of the poison.

Stiles sets his coffee in front of him, then leans on the other side of the counter. “Me and Derek were talking. He said you were suicidal.”

“Where is Derek?” Peter takes a sip of his coffee, ignoring the way his hand shakes.

“Getting lunch. I sent him for burgers. Apparently he still keeps nothing in his kitchen apart from protein bars and coffee.” Stiles shudders. “So, this summer? Suicidal?”

Peter appreciates the way he doesn’t ask in some cloying, pseudo-sympathetic manner. Still, it takes him a while to formulate an answer to such a jarring question. “Not suicidal. Practical.”

“Meaning?” Stiles’s amber eyes hold his gaze steadily.

“I did what was necessary to protect the pack.” Peter rubs the phantom ache in his chest. This brief exchange has made him feel weaker than before.

Stiles’s eyes narrow. “You’re going to have to explain that to me, Peter. How does betraying Scott protect the pack? Scott _is_ the pack.”

There is a tiny, tiny uptick in Stiles’s heartbeat that calls him a liar. But maybe Stiles doesn’t know it’s a lie.

“Every man and his dog can walk over Scott McCall,” Peter says, keeping his tone mild. “He was more of a threat to the safety of the pack than any outsider. He let Kate live. He let Theo in.”

Stiles doesn’t even flinch, and Peter knows he’s not telling him anything he hasn’t already picked apart in that clever brain of his a hundred times or more.

“The pack needs an alpha who will fight to protect it,” Peter continues. “Someone who is equal to the monsters who are drawn to the Nemeton.”

“Someone like you?” Stiles asks, brows arching.

“No.” Peter sips his coffee. The taste of it makes him want to be sick. He sets his mug down before he drops it. Hides his weak, trembling hands in his lap. “Someone like the alpha I tried to train Scott to be.”

For a moment Stiles is silent, and then he laughs. The sound is rough, sharp. “Oh, that’s gonna be a hard sell even for someone as cynical as me, Peter. You betrayed Scott in order to teach him how to be a better alpha? You got all friendly with Kate Argent just to make him snap? You didn’t really want to be alpha again? You wanted to teach Scott an important life lesson, like everything that went down was some nightmare version of an after school special?”

Peter raises his brows. “It worked.”

Stiles’s smile fades, leaving something like surprise behind.

The silence lengthens between them.

“You don’t believe me,” Peter says at last, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Well, I don’t have an inbuilt wolfy lie detector,” Stiles replies. His gaze is narrow again. “Also, you’re a lot of things, Peter, but I don’t think you’re that self-sacrificing.”

It’s a fair assessment, probably. It shouldn’t sting the way that it does. Not because it’s true or it isn’t—truth isn’t some immutable, unassailable thing, and that’s not just Peter’s moral relativism talking. It stings because, out of all of them, Peter had thought that Stiles would be the one to understand. Stiles, after all, is the one who has walked the same knife-edge Peter has. With Peter it was madness, and with Stiles it was the nogitsune, but they’ve both been to dark places. Both spent enough time there that it’s clouded their vision of the light ever since. Stiles knows that Peter’s not a saint, but he should also know that he was never simply a monster.

“It’s not about self-sacrifice,” Peter says. He stands and shoves his mug away from him. Coffee slops over the edges. “It’s not about being the alpha. It’s about being what I was born to be.”

“And what’s that, Peter?” Stiles asks, his expression unreadable.

“The left hand,” Peter says, feeling his eyes flash.

Stiles takes a step backward, his heartbeat ratcheting up.

The sudden rush of power recedes as quickly as it hit, and leaves him weak with fatigue. He stares at Stiles a moment longer, and Stiles stares back.

Apparently they have nothing else to say.

Peter climbs the stairs again, feeling Stiles’s stare the entire way.

 

***

 

The woods are deep and dark. Peter’s claws dig into the loam as he walks beside the boy. They stop at a clearing on a bluff that overlooks Beacon Hills. Below them, the lights of the town flicker and shine like stars.

Stiles sits.

Peter sits too, and then lowers himself all the way down. He turns his head to rest his chin on Stiles’s knee.

“I didn’t know,” Stiles tells him. He runs his fingers along the bridge of Peter’s nose, up between his eyes. Tugs his ears gently. “I didn’t know what a left hand was, Peter.”

Peter’s ears twitch, and he whines a little.

Does Stiles know who Peter is, then? Probably. Dream Stiles may be a construct of Peter’s subconscious, who can only exist in this strange, liminal dreamscape. Peter has no reason to imagine that this is a space they share, that Stiles is any more real than the woods, or the town, or the field of stars wheeling above them.

His infinite space.

“You never…” Stiles takes a breath and starts again. “You never killed anyone you didn’t have to.”

There’s no judgment in his tone, only quiet certainty.

“You didn’t kill Chris,” Stiles says, curling his fingers gently around Peter’s muzzle. “Or Kira. And you didn’t kill Scott, not even when you had the chance.” His mouth quirks in a wry smile. “You didn’t kill me either.”

Peter huffs into the warmth of Stiles’s palm, indignant.

“Even when you were mad,” Stiles says softly, “you didn’t kill me.”

They watch the town for a while.

“Laura, though…” Stiles exhales slowly.

Peter whines.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, the word escaping on another soft breath. “She left you, didn’t she? She was the alpha, and you needed her, and she left you. That must’ve hurt.”

It still hurts, in a place deeper than any burn could touch him.

“Must be lonely,” Stiles whispers at last, “being the left hand.”

There’s a slow dawning realization in his expression, and Peter wonders if this is the moment that Stiles sees the truth. Sees that he is for Scott what Peter was for Talia: clever, dangerous, but ultimately mistrusted. Ultimately alone.

Peter whines again, and closes his eyes as Stiles pets him softly.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s morning. Stiles blinks awake way too early for whatever shit today undoubtedly plans to throw at him, and stares up at the ceiling until he can actually summon up enough motivation to move. And most of that motivation comes down to the fact that he’s way too old to wet his bed.

He goes to the bathroom, then heads downstairs to scrounge up some breakfast.

It’s never a good sign when Stiles hears his dad’s cruiser pull up in the driveway and then nothing else. It means John’s taking longer than usual to shake off the weight of his shift. Stiles meets him at the front door.

“Hey, Dad.”

John smiles. “Hey, kiddo.”

“Rough night?”

“Not great.” John hangs his hat on the hook just inside the door, and heads for his study to lock his firearm in the safe. “Couple of cats nailed to a fence. Hearts removed. Well, you know the drill.”

“I didn’t hear any of that on the scanner,” Stiles says, leaning in the study doorway. “Which of course I didn’t, because why would I even have a scanner?”

“Nice save,” John tells him dryly. “Anything on the research front?”

“Getting there,” Stiles says. After yesterday’s abortive attempt to maintain a civil conversation with Peter, Stiles is going to try again this morning. He wants to detest Peter—really, it would be simpler—but that thing he said yesterday about being the left hand? Drawing the short straw, more like. Stiles researched it.

It also doesn’t help that he’s dreaming of a wolf every night. Of Peter the wolf specifically. It was actually almost comforting when he didn’t know who the wolf was, and it was just a solid presence at his side. It made it easier to navigate whatever creepy dreams his subconscious mired him in. But _Peter_? Stiles would prefer to keep the zombie creeper wolf out of his dreams, thanks very much. Particularly if Stiles is bonding to a dream representation of him.

Really, after this Stiles is going to get a therapist. Clearly he needs one.

“Anything from Scott?”

Stiles shrugs, and hits the start button on the coffee machine. “Patrols haven’t turned anything up.”

He’s exchanged a few texts with Scott in the past few days to verify that. Scott hasn’t said anything about Peter and Derek being back in the loft. Maybe he hasn’t noticed yet. It’s not like he’s been hanging around Stiles enough to catch their scents or anything, right? It’s not like he’s got any time for Stiles anymore.

And there it is.

All the emotional maturity of a whiny child, like this is no different than the time when Scott said he’d come over and play Mario Karts when they were nine, and then he forgot to show up because he went and hung out with some other kids instead. And yes, Stiles still remembers it vividly. He doesn’t have enough friends to just brush shit like that off.

Then again, he’ll have no-one to blame but himself when Scott finds out about Peter and Derek.

So.

“I’ll talk to Peter again today,” he tells John. “Ask him about the symbol.”

His dad’s mouth presses into a thin, disapproving line. John had _not_ approved of the plan to break Peter out of Eichen House. Which is why Stiles had only told him after the fact.

“The cats,” Stiles says to steer the subject away from possible felony charges. “Let me guess. The Gutierrez place on Pine Ridge Road.”

John nods, and claps him on the shoulder. “Following the pattern?”

Stiles thinks of the valknut. “Yeah.”

“Which means you can predict the next target.”

“Looks like,” Stiles says. “But I’d sleep a hell of a lot easier if I knew if it was gonna be a cat or another kid.”

John nods. His fingers dig into Stiles’s shoulder. “Me too, son. In the meantime, maybe you’d like to share the next location?”

Stiles’s holds his father’s gaze.

There was a time when Stiles would have moved mountains to keep his dad safe from the supernatural what-the-fuckery that is Beacon Hills. A part of him still wishes that he could. Jesus, though. His dad probably wishes the exact same thing.

“Three Mile Road,” Stiles says, swallowing. “Number twelve, maybe fourteen.”

And this must be what growing up feels like. Knowing that his dad is going to be staking out the location until the killer strikes, putting himself in danger because Stiles told him how. Because, whatever happens, it’s the right thing to do, and because Stiles can’t keep his dad safe in his cupped hands, held so tight, so close, any more than his dad can do the same for him.

“Getting closer to town,” John comments.

“Yeah.” Stiles flinches when the coffee machine starts to burble. “Seems like.”

He must be acting even more twitchy than usual, because John reels him in for a hug and doesn’t let him go for a long time.

 

***

 

Stiles collects Malia before they head to the loft.

“Are you okay with this?” he asks, grinding the Jeep from second gear into third. The Jeep complains noisily, and Stiles wonders how much that sound is going to cost him.

“With what?” Malia asks, narrowing her eyes. If she doesn’t immediately understand the motives behind a question, she suspects she’s being tricked somehow. She doesn’t understand why people can’t just get to the point. Nuance is over-rated.

“With Peter being out of Eichen.”

Malia wrinkles her nose, and shrugs. “I don’t care, as long as he doesn’t try and kill anyone.”

Sometimes Stiles really envies Malia her pragmatism.

“Well,” she clarifies, leaning forward to change the radio station. “Anyone I _like_.”

 

***

 

When they arrive at the loft, Peter and Derek are sitting at the table. Derek is glaring at Peter, and Peter is wearing a slight smirk. He looks better than he did yesterday. Business as usual then. Stiles almost missed this.

No, that’s a lie.

He did miss this.

Both Peter and Derek both look at him a little strangely as he sits down beside Derek and fishes in his pocket for his phone. Must be the relief that Stiles can feel rolling off him in waves, and that the wolves can definitely smell. It just feels right, okay? It feels like all the pieces are slotting back together again at last. Stiles knows where he stands, for the first time in a long time.

Malia takes a seat at the head of the table, and Stiles wonders if it’s a conscious decision not to sit beside Peter, or if it’s instinct warning her not to get too close. He’s her father, but in no meaningful sense of the word. Malia is closer to John than she is to Peter. Still, Stiles finds he likes the symmetry of this moment. Him, and the Hales. He can almost imagine it’s a private family moment that he’s been privileged to join, instead of what pretty much amounts to a coincidence.

He catches Peter’s gaze.

“You look tired,” Peter says, tilting his head slightly. "Are you sleeping?" 

Stiles doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he ignores it. Just finds the photograph of the corkboard and string on his phone, and slides it over to Peter. “Do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” Peter says, hardly glancing at it. “It’s a valknut.”

Derek reaches for the phone, and furrows his brow as he looks at the screen. “You’ve seen one before?”

“Yes,” Peter says again, in that maddeningly calm way that somehow manages to insinuate he knows a hell of a lot more than he’s saying, and finds the entire situation both vaguely amusing and utterly below his consideration.

“What does it mean?” Stiles asks.

“It’s a challenge,” Peter says, shrugging slightly. “Probably from a pack with northern European roots, which honestly doesn’t narrow it down very much. We’re a nation of immigrants, after all.”

“What sort of challenge?” Stiles presses.

Peter’s bright blue gaze finds him again. “For territory, of course. It’s very old, very traditional.”

Stiles tries very hard not to think about Mr. Robinson, and about the nine-year-old girl who was found in the same condition. Hell, he can’t even think about the cats without feeling sick to the stomach. “So this is a threat? Someone killed a _kid_ to send us a message?”

“Unfortunate.” Something like distaste passes over Peter’s face, and then he blinks and it vanishes. “But no, it’s not meant to be a threat, exactly. Someone thinks this territory is up for grabs, and they’ve signaled their intent to take it. It’s a notification. Basically the werewolf equivalent of a court official telling you you’ve been served.”

Derek sets the phone down again.

Peter picks it up. “What do the different colored pins mean?”

“Um, red for people, blue for animals.”

“And the pattern starts on the left and works right?” Peter waits for Stiles’s slight nod. “Yes. They’re not escalating, you see? They didn’t start with animals and work up to humans. That’s not how it works. They’ll just take the first heart they find. Animal or human, it makes no difference.”

“Shit.” Stiles grabs his phone back. The legs of his chair scrape against the floor as he pushes it back. He crosses the floor into the kitchen, and leans against the counter to call his dad. “Dad?”

“What have you found?” John asks.

“Okay, so you can’t be at Three Mile Road. And you need to get the people out of there. Whoever is doing this, they’ll kill a person or an animal. So we have to make sure there are no people there, okay?”

John is silent for a moment. “Gas leak?”

“Perfect,” Stiles says, the tightness in his chest loosening. “We’ll let them kill a squirrel or something instead.”

“I’ll get on it,” John says. “Tell me whatever else you find out.”

“Yeah. Stay safe, Dad.”

“You too, kiddo.”

Stiles ends the call and wipes his palms on his jeans. He knows everyone at the table would have heard the entire conversation, and the panic in his voice, but the illusion of privacy always helps a little. He waits until he can draw a breath without shaking before he heads back to the table.

“Smart,” Derek says, with a nod. He’s as taciturn as always, but Stiles feels warmth expand inside his chest. He knows praise from Derek when he hears it. Which he rarely does, because, well, _Derek_. Derek’s bad at giving praise because he’s even worse at receiving it. Stiles had thought Derek was an asshole, once. Turns out that Stiles just needed to learn to read him better.

“Thanks,” he says.

Okay, so a gas leak here, and a chemical spill there, and whatever the hell else they need to do, and maybe his dad can actually keep people out of harm’s way for as long as it takes them to hunt down whoever is doing this.

Stiles sits down again. “Just like playing Risk, right? Keep shifting your pieces all over the board until you’re strong enough to fight back.”

“I prefer a chess analogy,” Peter says mildly.

“You would,” Stiles shoots back. “Snob.”

Peter’s smirk is strangely comforting in its familiarity.

Stiles takes a breath and refocuses. “Okay, so you said that someone thinks this territory is up for grabs? How does that work? Scott’s a True Alpha.”

“Scott’s a child who has never signed a treaty with another pack in his incredibly short life,” Peter tells him. “And he has a pack full of bitten wolves and not-even-wolves who know absolutely nothing about the history and traditions of werewolves. He doesn’t even have an official emissary.”

“No, but I showed Deaton the valknut and even he didn’t know what it meant!”

“That’s because he’s never seen one,” Peter says smoothly. “And that’s because Beacon Hills has been Hale territory for almost two hundred years. And every treaty that was ever signed was valid for as long as a Hale wolf was living here.”

“But…” Stiles looks around the table.

At Derek, who left.

At Malia, who isn’t a wolf.

And at Peter…

“But why now though? Why not after the fire?”

“After the fire, I was still here,” Peter says, his gaze hardening. “In body, if not in spirit. Technically still alive though. And here’s a fun little fact. Eichen House is half a mile outside what is considered Hale territory. So as soon as Scott put me there, our territory was considered _terra nullius_. Up for grabs.”

In the silence that follows, Derek clears his throat. “I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have left, if I’d known.”

“Like anyone can blame you for not knowing some obscure werewolf law,” Stiles tells him. He catches the flash of hurt that crosses Derek’s face, and reaches out and curls his fingers over his forearm. “Nobody blames you for leaving either, Derek. Just, you know, thanks for coming back when we needed you.”

Peter’s gaze is openly curious as it falls on Stiles’s hand.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Malia announces suddenly. “When do we get to the part where we kill the bad guy?

It doesn’t surprise Stiles when Peter laughs. He’s only surprised to find there’s no trace of mockery in the sound.

 

***

 

“Now this,” Stiles says later as Peter manages to crowd him up against the kitchen counter, “I haven’t missed. Back off, creeper wolf.”

Peter’s eyes flash, and his mouth curls in a smile. Still, he takes a step back and pretends he was only reaching for the bowl of apples on the counter in the first place. Right. Because he had to get all up close and personal with Stiles in order to do that.

He holds Stiles’s gaze as he bites into the apple, and Stiles glares at him.

Peter chews and swallows, then uses his thumb to clean up the glistening trail of juice slipping down his chin.

Fucking creeper.

Fucking hot creeper.

And that’s always been Stiles’s biggest problem with Peter. The way he smirks like he knows exactly what Stiles is thinking when he gets close. Which he probably does, because fuck werewolves and their sense of smell. The way he acts like this is a fun little game they play, even when Stiles isn’t smiling. It’s the way Peter gives the impression that if he applied just a tiny bit of pressure, Stiles would drop straight to his knees and—

Well, he acts like it’s a forgone conclusion or something, and Stiles is sure the only reason he does it is because he knows exactly how creepy it is. He just likes to make Stiles squirm.

“So how do you know what a valknut is anyway?” Stiles asks, clearing his throat.

“I made it my business to know about any threat to the pack,” Peter tells him. "Archaic or not."

He swipes his tongue over his bottom lip, and Stiles’s gaze is drawn right to it.

Asshole.

“So you’ve seen one before?” Stiles asks.

“Only in books,” Peter says, and then raises his eyebrows questioningly. “Oh, and in my dreams.”

Stiles’s heart skips a beat.

Shit.

Holy shit.

The dreams are real.

 

***

 

“Stay away from me,” Stiles tells the wolf that night, as it walks through the darkness with him.

Peter only growls in response.

“I’m serious. Stay the fuck away from me!” Stiles hits out at the wolf.

Peter doesn’t snap or snarl. Only skitters back a few steps and then watches him closely.

Stiles wraps his arms around himself and stalks down the empty road. It’s cold and dark, and Stiles is suddenly very aware of the way the trees loom out of the mist at the edges of the road. The way that the woods could be hiding any threat.

This is the first time he’s been scared in these dreams.

“Peter?” he whispers under his breath.

He only relaxes again when Peter reappears at his side. He reaches out and curls his fingers through his ruff. He holds on tightly as the fear of the dark recedes.

He’ll deal with his embarrassment when he wakes up.

Right now, he needs this.

 


	6. Chapter 6

Stiles heads over to Scott’s place before school the next morning. Scott’s in the shower when he arrives, so he helps himself to some cereal and eats it standing over the sink. He rinses the bowl out when he hears the shower stop, and treads up the stairs after giving Scott a few minutes to get dressed.

“Scott?”

“Hey.” Scott smiles his familiar welcoming smile, and some of the tension in Stiles’s chest eases. “Thought I smelled you. Did you eat my Lucky Charms, dude?”

“I totally left you some,” Stiles assures him.

Scott sits down on his bed and pulls his trainers on. “Cool.”

Stiles leans in his doorway. “So, I’ve found out some stuff about the murders.”

Scott looks at him expectantly.

“They’re in a pattern,” Stiles says. “It’s called a valknut. Some weird Viking thing. Anyway, it’s a challenge. Some other pack thinks that this territory is no longer protected by all the treaties the Hales made with other packs, so they’re signaling their intention to take it.”

“Which other pack?” Scott asks, eyes narrowing.

“That’s the part I don’t know yet,” Stiles says. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, and tries not to look at the posters on Scott’s wall, the books in his bookshelf. So much of Stiles’s history is tied up in this room as well. Models he helped Scott build. Games they played. Stiles wouldn’t be surprised if Scott still keeps the same box of Lego under his bed that they used to dig through on sleepovers. “Also, you’re not going to like how I found this stuff out.”

Scott stills for a moment, and Stiles doesn’t need to be a wolf to sense the change in the air.

“How did you get it?” Scott asks at last, keeping his voice even.

“I broke Peter out of Eichen House.”

A look of betrayal flashes over Scott’s face, and Stiles thinks, in a rush of sickening awareness: _It’s_ both _of us. I don’t understand him anymore, and he doesn’t understand me either_. He doesn’t know if it’s the look on Scott’s face—the same one Stiles saw when he told Scott he’d killed Donovan—or the thought of the box full of Lego under the bed that makes his chest ache the most.

“I did it for you,” he says, and can’t even tell if it’s a lie or not. “I did it for the pack.”

“You should have talked to me first!” Scott exclaims.

“When?” Stiles asks. “When is the last time that was even an option for us, Scott?”

_When is the last time you had time for me?_

Scott looks at him as though he’s genuinely shocked, and in that moment Stiles really, really hates him. He hates himself too, for feeling this way, when clearly they’re both to blame. He doesn't know how they let it go so wrong. He doesn't know how to fix it. 

“Whatever,” he says, before Scott can say anything. “It’s done now, and we know more than we did before. I’m not going to apologize for that.”

He turns and heads back down the stairs.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t go to school.

He doesn’t go to the loft either.

He heads home and helps himself to one of his dad’s sleeping pills.

“Don’t judge me,” he says to the wolf when it slips between the trees of his dream, blinking in the sunlight as though it’s confused. “We’ll add it to my list of unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

The wolf gives him the side eye.

“On the plus side,” Stiles tell him, “I am no longer terrified of falling asleep. So, there’s that.”

The wolf sits down beside him, stretching out and scraping its claws through the dirt.

“You’re not even creepy in this form,” Stiles says, and scritches Peter behind the ears.

Peter’s growl is belied by the way his eyes half-close in bliss.

They doze together in the sunlight.

 

***

 

Stiles jerks awake when he hears his bedroom window sliding open. He snorts, and flails, and squints at the figure climbing through his window.

“Peter? What the hell!”

Peter’s wearing what looks like one of Derek’s Henley’s. It’s stretched tight across his torso, and very unfairly draws Stiles’s gaze to his neck.

“What?” Peter asks, closing the window again behind him. “I was having a nice little nap, thinking you were safely at school. And here you are instead, desperate enough to take a sleeping pill just so you can spend time with the wolf?” He spreads his arms. “Well, here I am.”

Oh _shit_.

Stiles’s jaw drops. Not only are the dreams real, but he’s not the only one who’s figured it out. He shouldn’t be surprised. Peter’s always been one step ahead of the game, whatever the hell game they’re playing. So of course he’s figured it out too, probably before Stiles did, and of course he’s here to be an asshole about it.

Stiles can feel the heat rising in his face, blotching his cheeks. His breath catches in his throat every time he tries to pull it into his lungs. He can feel anxiety beginning to sharpen at the edges of his awareness.

Peter stares at him for a while. “You’re upset.”

Stiles hauls himself upright, and plants his feet on the floor. “Well, duh.”

“ _Duh_?” Peter mimics. “Really, Stiles?”

He says it with an air of disappointment, like he knows Stiles could do a hell of a lot better. Stiles is a disappointed in himself too, honestly.

“I need my Adderall,” Stiles mutters. He’s really not ready for a battle of wits with Peter Hale.

“You might want to wait until the sleeping pill is out of your system,” Peter says.

“What? You’re a pharmacist now?”

“No, but I have had recent experience with debilitating chemicals.” Peter’s faint smile fades. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”

“I don’t want a glass of water!” Stiles mutters, but Peter’s already gone. Stiles flops back onto his mattress. He covers his eyes with his arm, and imagines he can still feel the sunlight on his skin. It’s easy to sink back into the memory of the dream, or back into the influence of the sleeping pill. He’s jostled awake again when the mattress dips.

Peter’s sitting beside him, reaching out to set a glass of water down on his nightstand.

Stiles grabs his pillow and shoves it over his face. “Scott hates me.”

“Possibly.”

Stiles wrenches the pillow away again, and scowls at Peter. “You’re pretty bad at this comforting bullshit, you know?”

Peter shrugs. “Probably.”

Stiles huffs in amusement at that, and then wonders if he should be freaking out more. This is Peter Hale, former lunatic and serial killer. Or is it spree killer? Point is, Stiles can’t really be sure that “former lunatic” is something to put his trust in.

Except, also, this is Peter Hale, the wolf who keeps him safe in his dreams.

It makes no sense.

“I was my sister’s left hand,” Peter says. “It’s an isolating position. A necessary evil, I once heard Talia call it, as though I wasn’t the same pup she’d once played hide and seek with in the woods.” He shrugs. “Maybe by then I wasn’t.”

Stiles thinks of that damn Lego again.

Peter shifts so he’s leaning up against the headboard of Stiles’s bed. He stretches his legs out along Stiles’s comforter. “You’re a left hand too, Stiles.”

“I didn’t even know what that was until two days ago.”

Peter hums in agreement. “Doesn’t mean you weren’t one from the beginning.”

Stiles edges a little closer to him. He’s not going to analyze why. That way lies fucking madness. Except in all his dreams he touched Peter, leaned against him, and Peter let it happen, so…

Stiles leans his head against Peter’s chest, holding his breath as Peter’s arm comes around him. He squeezes his eyes shut because he doesn’t want to see. Doesn’t want to have to look this thing in the eye—whatever the hell it is—and put a name to it. This is no different than leaning against the wolf in his dreams, right?

Except, of course, for in every way that it really, really is.

Stiles can’t help but relax anyway.

 

***

 

When he turns his head and sees the wolf stretched out on the bed beside him, Stiles figures he’s fallen asleep. He cards his fingers through the thick ruff on the wolf’s neck, and doesn’t feel as lonely anymore.

 

***

 

He wakes up to find himself curled up against Peter, his face pressed into the crook of the man’s throat, and one hand curled around the back of his neck, fingers tugging gently at the hair there. Peter has one hand curled around Stiles’s nape in return, and one resting on his lower back. Stiles is half lying on top of Peter, one leg wedged between Peter’s, and Jesus, it feels good and warm and safe. The second Stiles thinks that he rebels against the wave of bad-wrong horror that follows.

He’s cuddling with Peter Hale.

Former lunatic Peter Hale.

Murderer and sociopath Peter Hale.

Malia’s _dad_ Peter Hale.

It’s the last one that freaks him out the most, if he’s honest.

“Shh,” Peter murmurs. “It’s alright. Shh.”

It’s clearly _not_ alright, but Stiles freezes like a bunny in the grip of a predator. His heart thumps wildly against his ribs, and adrenaline courses through him. If he’s going to have a panic attack, now would probably be the right time for it.

“Shh,” Peter says again.

Stiles’s fingers twitch against the back of Peter’s neck.

Peter exhales slowly. “When I was about nine, we went to visit another pack in Oregon. I knew what I was from the moment I was a child, but I didn’t really know what it _meant_. Talia wasn’t the alpha then; our mother was still alive. Talia would have been twenty. Not as grown up as she thought she was.”

Stiles closes his eyes again.

Peter’s breath is warm on the top of his head. “There was this boy there. Arrogant little fucker. You know the sort. He thought he’d win bragging rights if he screwed Talia Hale. Of course, he didn’t count on me, did he?”

Stiles smiles slightly at the smirk in Peter’s tone.

“He had this ridiculous flashy car,” Peter continues.

“Of course he did,” Stiles murmurs.

“Of course.” Peter rubs his back, and his touch is so warm. “Well, what could I do? I was nine. He would have wiped the floor with me if I’d tried to fight him. So I created a distraction to get his mind off Talia.”

“What?” Stiles asks.

“I drove his car into the lake,” Peter says.

Stiles snorts.

“It was astonishing how quickly it sank,” Peter says. “It was truly a beautiful thing.”

“Was he pissed?” Stiles asks.

“Oh, he was murderous,” Peter answers, the smirk back in his voice. “But who would ever suspect innocent little Peter? I had quite the cherubic thing happening back then.”

Stiles doesn’t doubt it.

“It’s funny,” Peter says. “The universe has a way of threading things together. The tow truck driver was from a neighboring pack, one we hadn’t intended to meet. He brought his son with him to help, and that’s how Talia met James, when she was consoling some douchebag about his flooded car.”

“James?”

“Derek’s father. He was a good man.”

Peter falls silent then, and so does Stiles. He sometimes forgets exactly how much the Hales have lost. Forgets how even the good memories will always be overlaid with sadness, like a layer of ash that can never be swept clean. Sometimes he doesn’t know how they still have the strength to fight, when they must be so very broken.

Stiles closes his eyes again, as Peter rubs his back gently.

Strange, to find such comfort with a man like Peter. But maybe not the strangest thing in Stiles’s life. He’s selfish enough not to question it, not when he needs it right now. There will be plenty of time for self-recrimination later.

He dozes, maybe for a few minutes, maybe for longer. It’s not until Peter’s hand sweeps lower, grazing over his ass, that he lurches back into anything like wakefulness. Then Peter cups his left ass cheek, and Stiles’s stomach lurches.

“Shh,” Peter murmurs and Stiles realizes with horror that he’s rocking against Peter gently. Worse than that, he’s hard. And he’s not the only one. Peter’s dick is jabbing into his hip. “Shh.”

Peter spreads his legs a little more, and Stiles’s left leg slides between them, and suddenly he’s straddling Peter’s muscular thigh, and the friction is fucking incredible. Peter keeps one hand on his ass, encouraging Stiles to keep rubbing against him, and it’s filthy, and it’s wrong, but it feels so good that Stiles can’t stop. He rocks against Peter’s thigh urgently, biting his bottom lip to stop himself from whimpering.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” Peter says, his voice low. “Take what you need.”

It’s over ridiculously quickly.

Stiles hides his face in Peter’s throat and pants like a fucking dog as he comes.

“That’s it,” Peter says, voice as calm as always. “Good boy.”

Stiles sinks back into sleep.

 

***

 

“Don’t look so fucking pleased with yourself,” he tells the wolf.

Peter’s tail thumps against the ground.

Stiles stretches out in the sunlight. His shirt rides up, and the sun feels good against his stomach.

Peter stands and crowds close.

“If you piss on me, I’ll get Deaton to neuter you.”

Peter huffs, and ducks his head to press his cold nose against Stiles’s abdomen. Stiles squawks, and pulls his knees up. Peter huffs again, tail wagging faster, and ducks under Stiles’s flailing arms to lick a stripe up the side of his face. Then he dances away, out of reach.

“Dick,” Stiles tells him, weak from laughter.

Peter looks smug.

 

***

 

When Stiles wakes up, Peter is gone and Stiles can hear his dad rattling around downstairs. Stiles reaches for his phone and checks his messages. There’s one from Scott:

_We need to talk._

_Ok_ , Stiles sends back, his stomach twisting. _Tell me when and where._

There’s a message from Malia too:

_Peter said I had to send you his number. So here it is._

Followed by a line of digits that Stiles saves.

_Also, he is taking me and Derek to the steakhouse for dinner tonight. I think he’s trying to bond. I’m frightened._

Stiles snorts, and sends back: _Just don’t turn your back on him._

He has to wait a little while for her reply.

_Not an idiot, Stiles!_

No, of course she’s not. Stiles isn’t sure he can say the same about himself though. He rolls over and groans into his pillow, and absolutely doesn’t think about how he brought himself off against Peter’s leg, and how fucking good it felt.

No.

Not thinking about it.

It never even happened.

Except later, when he’s drifting off to sleep, it’s not guilt and humiliation that haunt him. It’s not even arousal. It’s a sense of safety, of security, of how right it felt to just let go while someone held him.

While _Peter_ held him.

Just one more crazy fucking thing in his life that doesn’t make any logical sense.


	7. Chapter 7

Apparently none of the kids even think twice about skipping school, even though this is their senior year, and really? Scott? Scott needs all the contact hours he can get, frankly. Young Mr. McCall has never been the sharpest tool in the shed. And yet it’s Scott who turns up at the loft the next morning instead of to class, and Peter’s grudgingly impressed to see that he almost looks like he’s growing into himself. It appears as though being forced to make a few hard decisions over the summer—Peter doesn’t flatter himself that he was one of those—has started to shape him into something almost resembling a real alpha. And not before time.

Scott’s eyes flash alpha red when he sees Peter sitting on the stairs, in what Peter thinks of as his customary lurking position. It’s a good vantage point to see everything going on in the loft, while at the same time maintaining a safe distance. And, of course, it gives Peter the opportunity to literally look down on everyone else. Back when the pack was Derek’s, at least, and pack meetings were held in the loft. Peter’s almost nostalgic for those days. After six years in a coma it felt good to be surrounded by people again, even if those people were annoying teenagers.

Derek gets in front of Scott before Scott can launch himself at Peter.

“You’re back too?” Scott’s tone falls somewhere between a growl and a whine of betrayal.

“Stiles called me,” Derek says, like that’s all the explanation it requires.

It is, probably.

“So if you’re back, and this is about someone thinking your old territory is here for the taking, then is it all good now?” Scott looks cautiously hopeful.

Well, so much for shaping up into an alpha. He’s still such a child in many ways.

“The challenge has already been made,” Peter says, answering for Derek. “It was made under the traditional legal terms of these matters. There was no Hale in the territory when it was issued. They saw a window of opportunity, and they took it. It’s a legitimate challenge.” He lets his mouth curve into a smile. “Are you ready for it?”

Scott clenches his fingers into fists. “Yes.”

“I hope so,” Peter says, and genuinely means it. “You’ll need to be.”

Scott glares at him warily, and then looks to Derek. Peter isn’t sure what he reads in Derek’s expression, but his gaze, when he turns it back on Peter, is less unfriendly. He draws a deep breath, and nods. “Tell me what I need to know.”

Well, perhaps Scotty is smarter than Peter gave him credit for.

There’s hope for him yet.

 

***

 

There’s a careless intimacy in their dreams that Peter likes. It’s comfortable to walk beside Stiles, to be the wolf to his boy. It’s obvious that Stiles is struggling lately, but in this shadowed world built by their dreams, he relaxes. Smiles, even, and sometimes laughs. The rush that Peter feels when Stiles laughs is as addicting as the rush he once got from his stolen alpha power.

In their dreams, they roam the Preserve. Peter sniffs around the places he once knew, nudging Stiles in the directions he wants him to go. Sometimes they end up at the house, the way it was before the fire, and Stiles kicks off his shoes at the door—it makes Peter huff with amusement—and slips inside while Peter pads around the yard.

When Peter finds him again it’s in the library. Stiles is sitting cross-legged in one of the old wingback chairs. There’s a book open on his lap.

“Can’t count my fingers,” Stiles tells him with a grin. “But I’m apparently reading Middle English.”

Peter rests his head on Stiles’s knee, and thumps his tail against the floor. It’s not impossible. The dream was created by their shared consciousness after all, and Peter knows that book. He knows every thin page, every crack in the spine, every word. Even if they sound a little like gibberish as Stiles massacres the pronunciation.

 

_In a valey of this restles mynde,_

_I soughte in mounteyne and in mede,_

_Trustynge a trewelove for to fynde._

 

Stiles closes the books, and reaches out to tug Peter’s ears gently. They both glance up at the ceiling as they hear the thump of little footsteps overhead, and a child’s shriek of laughter.

“Do you think they’d still be there if we went up the stairs?” Stiles asks quietly.

Peter doesn’t know. He’s afraid that if he climbs the stairs and seeks out his family that the entire dream will shatter and crumble into bitter dust.

Stiles leans down and presses his forehead to Peter’s. “I don’t know what this place is,” he whispers. “I don’t know what any of this means.”

Peter gazes into his amber eyes.

“But I don’t think I can lose it.” Stiles swallows. “I don’t think I could handle that.”

Peter nuzzles his nose into the knot of Stiles’s cold fingers.

He feels exactly the same.

 

***

 

On Thursday night the pack meets at Derek’s loft.

The pack.

Peter doesn’t know who half these people are, and he honestly doesn’t care about the other half. He’s interested to note that Stiles drifts over toward him and Derek though, and Malia trails after him. He’s not sure that anyone else notices, except for Lydia. She’s always been sharp. Sharp enough not to pick a side. She sits at the kitchen counter and flicks through some app on her phone. She appears to pay no attention at all, but Peter knows better.

Peter isn’t sure what he expects from Stiles. Not after the other afternoon in his room. The glance Stiles gives him is questioning, but not hostile. Stiles leans on the wall, equidistant between where the pack is gathered around the couch, and where Peter is watching from the stairs.

Peter imagines them all as pieces on a chess board, moving in predetermined patterns, in intricate orbits, in ways that only he can see, looking at them from above. Clever, clever Peter. But of course Stiles is clever too. Peter watches him with the others. Watches his whiskey eyes note every tiny move. Watches him hide his shaking hands in the pockets of his jeans.

He reminds Peter of a child left out of some game, determined not to show his heartbreak. And Peter suspects it’s by no means the first time Stiles has been made to feel like this. Always an outsider, the outlier in any group. Peter is no stranger to it himself. That’s how the best left hands are made.

Liam seems to be acting as Scott’s second now, and that seems curious to Peter. That Liam is another person Scott forgave for his betrayal, when his sin seems so much more egregious than Stiles’s. But of course Scott understands what it’s like to be motivated by love. Well, why sugar coat it? By his dick. That’s Scott’s _modus operandi_. It’s when it comes to friendship that he seems to falter. He really is too young and too immature to be an alpha. He doesn’t deserve a left hand like Stiles.

“So, the killer is going to strike next at Three Mile Road,” Scott says, with an air of authority and confidence he certainly didn’t have when he came begging for answers yesterday morning. “It might even happen tonight. We should go out there and wait for him.”

“Is that allowed?” Stiles asks suddenly, looking to Peter. “Like, we don’t have to wait until the valknut is completed or anything?”

“It’s unusual,” Peter says. “Most packs use the time to call in reinforcements. But I’m guessing we have none of those.”

“I’ve got Chris Argent on speed dial,” Stiles says with a shrug, and a flash-in-the-pan grin.

Peter arches his brows. He’s hardly a fan of Chris, and the feeling is probably more than mutual since that whole pipe-though-the-gut thing, but Chris _did_ help break him out of Eichen House. If it comes to a fight—and of course it will, this is Beacon fucking Hills—then Chris Argent is a good man to have on their side. He and Peter will never be friends, but they’re both pragmatists. Peter has no doubt Chris will do what’s necessary. That’s probably the tragedy of both their lives, to be honest.

“We don’t have to wait for the valknut to be completed,” Peter confirms. “However, we also don’t know who we’re facing, and how many of them there are. This might be a better time to gather some intel, rather than rush straight into the fight.”

“And risk more people dying?” Scott asks hotly.

Oh, how Scott loves to play the hero. What a shame his actions so often fall short of his ideals.

“But we’re not risking more people dying,” Peter points out. “The alpha is not going to find any people on Three Mile Road, thanks to Sheriff Stilinski. And Stiles.”

Stiles catches Peter’s gaze, his eyes wide with something that might be surprise. It irks Peter that Stiles should be surprised to be given credit where credit’s due.

“I think we should go tonight!” some little pipsqueak pipes up. Rory? Corey? Like it matters.

“I’m ready to fight!” Liam exclaims in agreement.

“We should wait,” Stiles says, his voice firm.

Scott looks between them, his forehead creased in thought.

Peter sees the moment Stiles’s expression shutters. Sees the moment that Stiles knows Scott’s going to disregard his input.

Peter exchanges an uneasy glance with Derek, and knows his nephew has read the situation as well. There’s no hierarchy in this pack. Scott might be an alpha, but he still doesn’t know how to act like one. Scott doesn’t like to throw his authority around inside the pack. A noble gesture, possibly, but it’s stupid. They’re wolves. They _need_ a leader. They need to be growled at to be brought back into line. Everything is out of balance here. There is no way in hell that Scott should be giving equal weight to Stiles and Liam and Rory-Corey. Stiles has proved himself over and over again. He’s stood shoulder to shoulder with Scott since before the newbies even knew werewolves existed.

Peter should feel outraged, he thinks, but really it just makes him weary.

Peter hauls himself to his feet, and walks down the steps. He heads for the balcony. “Well, if you ever come to a decision, do let me know.”

He steps outside.

The evening is cool. There’s the promise of a faint chill on the air, heralding a change in weather that can’t be more than a week away. The last of the summer warmth is slowly leaching out of the earth. Soon the leaves will start to turn, and the days will grow damp and cool. Peter has always liked fall. There’s a sort of sweet melancholia wrapped around the season that makes him think of poetry. A slow farewell. An elegy.

And there are pumpkin lattes, of course. Peter has a weakness for pumpkin lattes.

He turns slightly as Derek comes to stand beside him on the balcony.

“They’re a terrible pack,” Peter says in a low voice.

Most of them aren’t even wolves. Peter’s not sure exactly what they are. But ‘science experiments gone wrong’ seems to fit the B-grade bill perfectly.

Derek’s mouth quirks in an unaccustomed smile. “They’re young.”

“And at this rate they might not live to see twenty.” Peter stares down at the street below. The view isn’t exactly edifying, but Beacon Hills has always been a study in how to live with lowered expectations.

Derek’s faint smile fades. He doesn’t even try to contradict Peter.

“Hell,” Peter says. “At this rate they might not live to see tomorrow.”

 

***

 

Three Mile Road is a little way out of town. The area is semi-rural. The houses are spaced far apart. The street is wide and dark. There are no streetlights this far out, no light pollution. The stars seem bright enough and close enough that Peter imagines he can reach up and snatch them out of the sky.

They arrive in a convoy of cars they leave about a mile away, and they walk in.

It’s a disaster, of course, just like Peter thought it would be.

The other alpha does not seem at all surprised to see them. And neither do his eight betas.

 

***

 

There’s no discussion, no parlay, and no negotiation, even though that’s obviously what Scott’s expecting. He doesn’t understand that the valknut _is_ the discussion, and that there is nothing else to say.

The unknown alpha and his betas charge toward them, faces contorting as they shift.

Chris Argent doesn’t even blink before he unloads a few rounds into the beta closest to him, and Peter feels a twinge of admiration, although it’s soured with jealousy. When Chris is a cold blooded killing machine he’s the hero, but when Peter does it, he’s a sociopath?

And then one of the betas is on him, and Peter decides to worry about the double standard later.

His wolf roars.

There is a pack within the pack.

Peter’s wolf knows it in its heart. His loyalty is not with Scott or the teenagers whose names he can barely remember. His loyalty is with Derek, with Malia, with Lydia _perhaps_ , and with Stiles absolutely. Peter makes sure to keep Stiles and Lydia behind him where the humans will be the safest. Derek and Malia have claws and fangs of their own.

Peter is fixated on the beta he’s fighting, but not fixated enough that he’s unaware of Stiles. He can’t afford tunnel vision. Stiles is close—swinging his baseball bat—and Peter fixes on his scent, on his elevated heartbeat as he fights.

Peter slams the beta into a tree, feeling bones crack. Hopefully his spine. The beta slumps to the ground, and Peter crouches over him with his claws out. The beta snarls and spits, and Peter grins at him as he draws his arm back. It’s been so long since he tore someone’s throat out. Too long.

That’s when he hears it.

A short, sharp sound that translates as pain.

A familiar scent sharpened with blood.

The soft thump of a body hitting the ground.

_Stiles._

Peter leaves the beta lying against the tree, and leaps back into the fight. It’s chaos, but Peter knows chaos. He thrives on chaos. He pushes past one of Scott’s teenage betas, and does him the favor of slicing his claws down the back of the wolf attacking him. It’s enough to cause the wolf to rear back, and give the teenager—Rory? Corey? Laurie?—the chance to regroup.

Peter doesn’t stop to see how that works out for him.

Not when Stiles is on the ground, some wolfed-out beta crouched over him, a clawed hand digging into the back of his neck. Stiles is struggling weakly under the beta, and the beta looks as pleased as a cat toying with a mouse. He looks fucking _delighted._

Peter roars, and leaps on the guy.

Tackles him onto the ground beside Stiles.

He realizes his mistake when the wolf’s eyes flare red.

Not a beta.

Peter feels a rush of heat. A rush of _want_.

The _alpha_.

And he’s right under Peter’s claws.

All that power for the taking.


	8. Chapter 8

Stiles doesn’t know when he dropped his bat. He only knows that suddenly he’s on the ground, the breath knocked out of him, and there’s a wolf on his back. Claws are digging into his neck, popping the skin as though it’s ripe fruit, there’s a knee in the small of his back, and another set of claws ripping through his jeans and into his hip.

Stiles screams maybe, or maybe he doesn’t have the breath.

But suddenly the wolf is ripped off him, and Stiles scrabbles uselessly in the dirt. He can’t get up. He can’t even breathe yet. And he’s bleeding. He slaps a hand against his throat, and his skin is hot and slick with blood. A fingertip slips into a furrow gouged by the wolf’s claws, and Stiles almost gags at the sensation. It’s deep. God, it’s deep, and what if he’s bleeding out?

He rolls onto his side, and flinches back just in time to prevent getting crushed by the growling, roaring wolves tearing into one another right beside him.

 _Peter_.

It’s Peter, and the wolf who attacked him.

“Stiles! Stiles!” Lydia crouches over him, and hooks her hands under his armpits. She drags him a few feet away. Presses her hand over his, keeping pressure on his wounds.

Stiles can’t tear his gaze away from Peter.

The other wolf roars, and his eyes flash alpha red.

Peter roars back, and slams the guy into the ground again.

Stiles blinks, and seconds pass. Hours, maybe. He’s slipping. He’s afraid to let go in case there’s no coming back.

He sees Peter raise his arm, claws extended.

“Peter,” he whispers, and it hurts so much. He blinks, and hot tears slide down his face.

He’d thought… he’d thought things would be different this time. Stiles is always looking for patterns. Always trying to stop from falling into them all over again. But here he is.

Maybe this is how it ends. Maybe Stiles dies like this. Maybe he doesn’t have to see Peter transform into an alpha. See him transform into a monster again. Peter was never meant to be the alpha. Maybe if Stiles closes his eyes he won’t have to see it happen.

“Stiles!” Lydia exclaims. “Stiles, stay with me!”

Stiles smiles slightly at that, at the memory of the time in his life when he would have been a slave to any of her commands, and closes his eyes.

 

***

 

Stiles is alone, and in a dark place. He turns, and stumbles.

“Peter?” His throat aches with tears. “Peter?”

This isn’t a dream world.

His wolf doesn’t come.

“Peter!” Stiles screams into the darkness.

Nobody comes.

 

***

 

Stiles is cold when he wakes up. Why is he so cold? His mouth and his throat are dry, but all he can focus on is the _cold_. He shifts uncomfortably, and slowly blinks the world into focus. He’s in a hospital bed. There’s a canula in his left arm pumping fluids into him, and a heavy plastic clip on his finger. Stiles lifts his right hand to his neck, and finds a thick pad affixed to his throat with surgical tape.

He tries to check the wounds on his hip, but it hurts too much to move. He grunts in displeasure.

“Stiles?”

Stiles turns his head to discover his dad sitting in a chair beside his bed.

His dad reaches for his hand, and threads his fingers through Stiles’s. “Wanna tell me what happened to the plan of keeping all the humans away from Three Mile Road?”

“Got outvoted,” Stiles rasps.

His dad pours a small amount of water into a cup, and helps him sit up enough to sip it without choking.

“What happened?” Stiles asks.

“Well, you won,” John says, twisting his mouth up unhappily. “Not that it looks like it! Some of the others got the hell beaten out of them as well too, but they’re sleeping it off at Deaton’s. Chris Argent got fourteen stitches in his leg. Melissa tried to have him admitted, but of course he refused.”

Stiles manages a smile. Of course he did.

“The alpha’s dead,” John tells him. “His betas decided that maybe Beacon Hills wasn’t worth fighting for after all.”

“It doesn’t even have an In-N-Out,” Stiles agrees, which everyone knows is a travesty.

John’s smile is brief; it crumbles quickly into something fraught. “Kid. You lost a lot of blood. It was pretty close.”

Stiles grips his hand tighter. “Did Peter kill the alpha?”

“No.” John looks at him steadily. “Lydia said he got Scott to do it.”

Stiles doesn’t know what to make of the warmth that spreads through his stomach at that. It makes him a little dizzy, and he’s too scattered at the moment to make any sense of it. Peter refused the chance to kill the alpha. Peter refused the chance to take an alpha’s power. _Peter_. Peter _Hale_. That’s… that’s not really the Peter Hale that Stiles knows. But it sounds like the Peter Hale that Stiles would like to know.

“I’ll let you sleep,” John says tenderly, rising to his feet. “The pack can wait until you’re out of here before they hassle you, okay?”

Stiles knows it isn’t really a question. “Okay,” he rasps. “’nother blanket?”

John leans down and kisses him on the forehead. “I’ll see what I can do, son.”

Stiles is asleep before he gets back.

 

***

 

The wolf in his dreams growls at him when he tries to move, so Stiles lies in the sunlight and blinks up at the sky, and runs his fingers through the wolf’s fur.

 

***

 

Stiles checks himself out of hospital before breakfast the next morning. Because hospital breakfasts? No, thank you. He texts his dad to let him know, and texts Lydia for a ride. She picks him up and they go to the diner for breakfast. Well, a milkshake. Stiles really doesn’t feel like he can handle much more than that at the moment. He gets banana, because why the fuck not?

“The pack’s in a mess,” Lydia tells him as she picks as her salad. Who has salad for breakfast?

“Don’t really care right now,” Stiles mutters.

“I know,” Lydia tells him, offering him a slight smile. “I just thought you’d appreciate the head’s up before you walk right into the middle of it.”

“Go on then,” Stiles says. “Hit me.”

“Liam’s pissed because Hayden got hurt, Corey’s having a meltdown because he’s terrible with blood, and Mason thinks Scott should have listened to you.” Lydia toys with a bean sprout. “Malia’s told Scott he’s a terrible alpha, and the only reason we survived is because of Peter, Chris and Derek. True, of course. Scott thinks that Peter’s playing some angle by making him kill the alpha, and—”

“ _Making_?” Stiles demands. “Peter didn’t _make_ him kill the alpha! It was the only choice, because otherwise someone else would have taken the alpha’s power!”

“Well, I know that,” Lydia says, “and you know that, but also, when has Peter _not_ played some angle?”

True. Stiles sucks on his straw and frowns slightly.

“Look,” Lydia says. “I don’t know what’s going on between you and Peter that you suddenly trust him. I’ll never trust him, you know that, but I trust _you_. So if you tell me that Peter’s not plotting something, I’ll believe you.”

“I don’t know,” Stiles answers honestly. “It’d be pretty stupid to trust him, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Lydia says. “All I know is that Peter Hale is not one of the good guys. But maybe it’s about time we had one of the bad guys on our team. God knows we could use the help.”

Stiles snorts. “Practical as always, Lyds.”

She shrugs and smiles. “I don’t care who he fucks up, as long as it’s not us. And if you’re sure it won’t be us…?”

“Maybe,” Stiles says. “Because everything he’s done…” He sighs. “You know in English how they’re always going on about alternate readings? Everything Peter does has an alternate reading. That doesn’t mean it’s true, though. It also doesn’t mean it’s a lie. It just means there’s room for a different interpretation.”

“Even for Laura?” Lydia asks.

Laura will always be the sticking point.

“She left him,” Stiles says quietly. “She was the alpha, and she left him. He was mad with grief, with betrayal. It’s not an excuse…”

“But it’s an explanation,” Lydia finishes, with a slight nod.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, and wonders if it’s enough. “It’s an explanation.”

Sometimes in life there are no excuses. Just explanations. Stiles can still feel the rain pelting him as he’d screamed at Scott to try and make him listen, try and make him understand about Donovan. About how he’d never meant for it to happen, but it had happened, okay? It had happened, and now what?

He doesn’t know if he and Scott will ever repair the damage done that night. He’s not even sure he wants to. The betrayal wasn’t as one-sided as Scott seems to think. Scott’s hands aren’t exactly clean either. Nobody’s are. So why did Scott look at him that night like Stiles was the worst monster he’d ever seen in Beacon Hills?

He rubs his throat.

“I’m tired, Lydia,” he says, jabbing his straw in his milkshake. “Most of the shit we dealt with over summer? It wasn’t Theo, or the Dread Doctors. It was the fact that I felt like nobody had my back.”

“Nobody?” Lydia asks quietly.

“Scott,” Stiles clarifies. “It feels like Scott didn’t have my back.”

“Well,” Lydia says, raising her eyebrows. “At least someone did last night.”

Stiles reaches up and presses his fingers against the dressing on his throat again.

Yeah, at least someone did.

 

 

***

 

John isn’t happy that Stiles discharged himself from hospital, but hey, he’s eighteen now, right?

“Come on, Dad,” Stiles grumbles as John gives him his patented Disappointed Dad Glare when Lydia drops him home. “I’m eighteen. I’ve officially passed the age where my dad can tell me what to do, and I only have a couple of months to enjoy that before you’re my _boss_ , so let me make a few dumb decisions on my own, okay?”

“Stiles,” John says, “you’ve been making dumb decisions since the day you figured out how to crawl. And you’re _never_ too old for your dad to stop telling you what to do.”

He pulls Stiles into a hug, and doesn’t let him go for a long time.

“Love you, kiddo,” he says, the words quiet and fierce at the same time.

“Love you too, Dad.”

John refuses to leave for work until Stiles promises to take it easy, to eat something, and to call him at the station if he needs anything. Getting him out the door is almost impossible, but Stiles is smiling by the time he finally leaves.

Stiles climbs the stairs and heads for the bathroom. He strips down for a shower, and inspects the dressing on his hip and his throat. The doctor told him he has stitches on the deepest puncture mark on his throat, but the others were shallow. The gouges on his hip have been glued. He was very lucky not to bleed out from the deepest puncture on his throat. A few millimeters to the right and the alpha would have got his carotid artery.

Stiles finds tape and Saran Wrap in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cabinet. It says a lot about Stiles’s life that he keeps this stuff here. He covers his dressings and steps into the shower. The hot water washes away the stench of the hospital: antiseptic, blood and stale, cold air. The heat soothes his aching muscles as well, and he’s tired and loose-limbed when he finally shuts the water off and reaches for his towel.

He heads for his bedroom, and is unsurprised to find Peter lying on his bed.

Stiles doesn’t even hesitate before he climbs onto the bed beside him, and tucks his face into the crook of his neck. Peter’s fingertips trace the dressing on his throat.

“You’re still damp, Stiles,” Peter murmurs at last. “You’ll catch a cold, and I am not the sort of man who deals well with runny noses and phlegm.”

“You wouldn’t make me soup?” Stiles asks.

“No,” Peter tells him. “I’d make you go to the store and buy your own.”

Stiles chooses to believe that’s a lie. That might just be the trick to getting a handle on Peter: ignoring the things that come out of his mouth, and focusing on his actions instead. Because Stiles doesn’t doubt for a second that if he so much as sniffled then Peter would be spooning homemade chicken soup into his mouth. After last night, how can Stiles believe otherwise?

“You didn’t kill the alpha,” Stiles says.

“No.” Peter tugs him closer, one hand drifting down his back to rest on the top of the towel.

“Why?”

“I was never supposed to be an alpha.” Peter’s voice is low.

Stiles reaches up and stretches an arm out over Peter’s torso. He hooks his fingers around his shoulder. “It never stopped you before.”

“Hmm.” Peter huffs, as though he’s amused. “Last time, I didn’t have anything left to lose.”

Stiles listens to Peter’s heart beating in his chest. Solid, slow, and sure.

“Pack meeting tonight,” Peter says at last, inhaling. “You need to get some sleep before then.”

Stiles closes his eyes. “So we can frolic in the woods together?”

“I beg your pardon,” Peter says. “I am a deadly apex predator. I do not frolic.”

Stiles thinks of ear scritches and belly rubs, and that one time Peter bounced through a carpet of clover like he was Tigger. He totally fucking frolics.

“Maybe I don’t want to go to sleep yet,” Stiles says after a while. “Not that I don’t like fluffy you…” He trails off suddenly, his face burning.

“Hmm.” Peter dips his fingers under the edge of the towel, drawing a line of goosebumps along Stiles’s hip. “You want to stay like this for a while, sweetheart?”

“Mmm.” Stiles’s heartbeat quickens, and he burrows closer to Peter to hide his shame at the way the word just fucking melts something inside him. “Please.”

“Whatever you want,” Peter says. “Whatever you need.”

Stiles closes his eyes to stop them stinging. “Just stay with me for a bit? Just be here, on my side?”

“Yes,” Peter says, dragging a hand through Stiles’s hair. His voice is low, rougher at the edges that Stiles is used to hearing from him. His breath is warm against the shell of Stiles’s ear. “I’m here. I’m on your side.”


	9. Chapter 9

Peter stays with Stiles until he falls asleep and then regretfully lets himself out of the house. He’d like nothing more than to slip into sleep with Stiles and see where their dreams might lead them, but he has to research first. And with the pack meeting this evening, Peter would rather know exactly what he’s dealing with before he faces Scott and the assorted annoying teenage drama queens he calls a pack.

He calls Derek to come and lurk outside Stiles’s house, because he doesn’t like the idea of leaving the boy unwatched. Peter has always closely guarded the people he considers precious, and Stiles has very easily worked his way onto that incredibly short list. Besides, it’s not like Derek has anything better to do with his time.

“You want to tell me what’s going on, Peter?” Derek asks when he arrives, nodding toward Stiles’s bedroom window.

“Not really,” Peter tells him, and holds out his hand for the car keys.

Derek passes them over without complaint.

Peter knows that he and Derek will never have the same relationship they did before the fire. That’s impossible. But they can build something new and, for the first time in a long time, Derek doesn’t seem to be resisting that. Peter wonders how much of it is because he saw Peter leave the alpha for Scott last night, but perhaps it’s been more subtle than that. Perhaps Derek’s seen the way that Stiles has grown closer to Peter. Derek might not entirely trust his own instincts—with a history like Derek’s, who can blame him?—but Peter is willing to bet he trusts Stiles’s.

Peter drives to the animal clinic. It’s closed for lunch, but Peter’s car isn’t the only one pulled up outside. Chris Argent’s SUV is there too.

Peter walks inside, and through to the back rooms.

He finds Chris sitting on one of the exam tables, with Deaton inspecting the stitches in his leg.

“Here for your distemper shot?” Peter asks him, leaning in the doorway.

Chris arches a brow. “Shouldn’t I be the one making dog jokes?”

“I dare you,” Peter says, folding his arms over his chest.

“Gentlemen,” Deaton says mildly, straightening up at last and tugging off his gloves. “It looks like the hospital did a good job. Just keep it clean and dry, and remember to take your antibiotics.”

Chris nods, cool gaze still fixed on Peter.

Interesting.

There’s none of the hatred that Peter had expected in that gaze, given how Peter hurt him that night in the sewers. Hurt, though. Didn’t kill. Peter has lines he won’t cross, and maybe Stiles isn’t the only one who sees them.

But then Chris has been a soldier his entire life. More than long enough to know there’s no black and white when it comes to war.

Peter wanders away while Deaton plays doctor. He finds himself in the back room, where his attention is drawn by a cage of kittens. Fuzzy, mewly little creatures. Peter unlatches the cage and lifts one out. It’s too young and stupid to realize he’s a predator, and cuddles up in the palm of his hand as he holds it against his chest. It’s totally black, except for one strange splash of orange behind its left ear. Odd little thing.

Peter sets it back in the cage again, and turns around to find Deaton watching him. Peter refuses to give him a chance to comment on the fact he was just cuddling a kitten. He folds his arms over his chest. “What do you know about dream sharing?”

Deaton looks as impassive as always, except for a slight lift in his brows. From Deaton, it’s the same as a cartoonish double take.

“Well,” he says at last. “I think you’d better tell me everything.”

 

***

 

Peter spends the afternoon checking through Deaton’s books. Nothing he finds is a surprise. There are no revelations packed inside the thin yellow-edges pages. No sudden, shocking reveals. Just a slow realization of a truth that Peter already suspected. It settles over him softly, strangely warm, and not as cloying as he’d feared: _Mates_.

 

***

 

Peter pokes around the loft while he waits for everyone to arrive for the pack meeting. Most of Derek’s furniture is still here, but it hasn’t escaped Peter’s notice that his nephew hasn’t actually unpacked since arriving back in town. He’s still living out of a duffel bag that he keeps under his bed, as though he’s ready to leave at a moment’s notice, to slip away like a thief in the night. Peter’s not sure there’s anything binding Derek to Beacon Hills anymore. The bad memories far outweigh the good.

He lies on Derek’s bed and thinks of Allegra. Thinks of the curls of her dark hair, and the curve of her smile. Thinks how strange it is that the universe has allowed him a second mate, when the loss of his first still aches.

“He’s irritating,” he tells Allegra, and imagines her laugh. “Maddening. You would like him, I think.”

In another world, on another path, Allegra would have lived. Their child would have lived. Peter’s life would have been so very different. Happiness is such a fleeting thing. Sorrow, though, lingers.

And the fight never ends.

 

***

 

Derek and Stiles are the first to arrive. Peter takes his position on the stairs, and watches as Stiles settles himself on the couch. He’s moving awkwardly, his aches and bruises clearly hurting him more now than they did this morning. Humans are such fragile things. Stiles shifts a little on the couch, then stands again and paces for a while. When he hears the door to the loft opening, his eyes widen a moment in panic as though he doesn’t know where to sit, where to stand. He ends up leaning against the wall, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans.

It’s Malia and Lydia.

Stiles relaxes when he sees them, and Peter watches as the girls cross the floor to him and ask in low voices how he’s feeling. Whatever answer Stiles intends to give them stays a mystery: at that moment Scott and the pack appear in the doorway, and Stiles clamps his mouth shut.

Peter watches as Scott greets Stiles. His smile is friendly, but there’s no hug, no touch. Nothing to indicate they once called themselves brothers. Just a cursory inspection, a smile, a nod, and can Scott even smell the tension souring Stiles’s scent? Smell his pain? He’s either oblivious, or he’s cruel.

Derek exchanges a glance with Peter.

Perhaps it’s because they’ve been away. Perhaps the shift in the relationship between Stiles and Scott has been so gradual that nobody else has noticed. An inch here, and inch there, but suddenly it’s a chasm. Stiles deserves better.

Peter stays silent as the pack meeting begins.

“So the alpha’s dead,” Scott says, “and the betas have run off. But this challenge thing? Is that something someone else can do?”

Derek glances at Peter again before he answers. “My family had treaties with most other packs in the country. It’s possible someone else might issue a similar challenge.”

“But you’re back now,” Scott says. “You and…” He looks over at Peter. “You and Peter.”

“We’re not pack,” Derek tells him.

Scott’s little betas look startled. Scott, meanwhile, wears that look of betrayal that suits him so very well and, Peter feels, is very well deserved.

“We’re not pack, Scott,” Derek repeats, his voice gentle. “I consider you a friend and an ally, but we don’t have a pack bond. I wouldn’t have left if we did.”

Scott looks at Peter worriedly.

Peter shrugs. “Don’t look at me. I abandoned what little respect I had for you when you abandoned Stiles.”

Scott’s jaw drops. “What? Stiles!”

Stiles is wide-eyed, panicky. “No! I’m pack! I’m still pack!”

“Pack is earned,” Peter says, eyes flashing as anger courses through him. “And you’ve done nothing to earn Stiles. He should be your most trusted packmate, and you barely even looked at him when you walked in here. He fought alongside you, he was _injured_ for you, and you treat him like he’s _nothing_.”

Scott looks stunned, his face a mask of shock.

The truth fucking hurts, and Peter is glad of it.

“You don’t deserve a friend like Stiles,” Peter tells him. “You don’t deserve to have him as your left hand. Everything he does, he does for the safety of the pack, and you’re so busy playing knight in shining fucking armor, that you don’t even see what sacrifices he makes for you. He’s done more to keep this territory safe than you ever have. Done more, and risked more, and you can’t even look him in the eye.”

Oh, poor little Scotty He looks so shocked. He’d thought the fight was over? That was never the fight.

 _This_ is the fight.

This has always been the fight.

Derek moves closer to the steps. Malia follows him. After a moment, so does Lydia.

Battle lines drawn.

The old pack against the new.

Shit just got interesting.

Peter stands up and walks down the steps. “The Hales have held this territory for two centuries. And we will help you hold it, but only if you deserve it. And right now you don’t fucking deserve it.”

Scott’s eyes flash red. “Are you challenging me, Peter?”

“If I was challenging you, pup, you’d know it,” Peter tells him, rolling his shoulders and showing his teeth in a cold smile. “If I was challenging you, I would have killed the alpha myself, and killed you next. I’m _warning_ you, Scott. I’m warning you that you’re not half the alpha you think you are, and that makes you a danger to this territory, to your pack, and to your friends. If you have any friends left, that is.”

Here, of course, is where the whole thing could fall apart.

Peter glances at Lydia, at Malia and at Derek, and finds them still all on his side. Well, not _his_ side. Stiles’s side. It’s a helpful distinction, and one that will probably let them sleep at night.

Scott looks at them to, and then looks to Stiles. Wanting Stiles to save him—no, _expecting_ Stiles to save him, just like always. “Stiles?”

Stiles is pale, hollow-eyed, as though he’s still wearing the shadow of the nogitsune. He flinches when Scott says his name. Balls his long fingers into fists. He meets Scott’s gaze though. “It was self defense.”

Scott looks confused. “What? Donovan? I know. I know it was. I thought we got past this, Stiles!”

“How can we?” Stiles demands, voice cracking. “How can we when it’s there every time you _look_ at me?”

“So what?” Scott asks. “So you think _Peter_ is on your side now?”

Peter can’t stop the low growl rising in his throat.

“Peter didn’t kill Erica and Boyd,” Stiles says, his voice low now, more controlled. “Deucalion did, and you made an alliance with him. Peter hasn’t killed anyone since he was mad, but you sent him to Eichen.”

Scott gapes at him.

“You know what Eichen is, Scott?” Stiles drags his shaking finger through his hair. “It’s _hell_.”

“It’s Peter!” Scott says, a note of desperation in his tone. A note of anger too. “ _Everything_ is his fault!”

Ah, so that’s how far back Scott wants to trace it, like following a spring to its source. Right back to the night that Peter bit him in the woods, and changed his life forever.

Stiles shakes his head, his mouth a tight line before he speaks. “No. Peter didn’t start this. Kate Argent did, and I don’t see you gunning for her right now.”

Oh, this boy. This clever, wonderful boy. Peter doesn’t need to smell his scent—frightened, panicked, soured with sorrow—to know how much this hurts him. But he’s still standing here, still saying what needs to be said.

This boy is more of a miracle than Peter ever did anything to deserve.

Scott looks lost. His anxious little betas cluster behind him. It’s Liam who breaks first, of course. Always quick to anger. His eyes flash yellow and he pops his claws.

Derek exchanges a weary look with Peter, and fronts up to the kid. Flexes his muscles and shows his own claws and fangs.

“Derek!” Scott exclaims.

“You should leave, Scott,” Peter tells him. “Leave and take whatever remains of your pack with you.”

Peter’s really not sure why it’s those particular words that cause Scott to wolf out. He doesn’t really care. He only knows that he has a split second to register the change coming over Scott’s features, and then his instinct takes over.

Protect Stiles.

Protect his mate.

Peter’s world shifts to scent, to sound, to sepia monochrome.

Peter is the wolf.

 

***

 

The wolf is a simple creature. It positions itself between Stiles and the alpha. Bares its teeth and growls. Waits for blood.

But the alpha doesn’t attack.

The alpha steps back, his stupid childish face pale with shock. Mouth agape, eyes wide.

The wolf deepens its growl, gaze fixed on the alpha.

The wolf is fixed on something else as well: on the rapid _thump thump thump_ of his mate’s heartbeat.

The wolf keeps growling until the alpha and his little betas retreat, leaving the loft empty of threats.

He hears people talking. Pack. Derek and Malia and Lydia. Hears the click of Lydia’s heels on the floor, smells the orange-blossom scent of her that makes his nose twitch. Malia’s scent is earthier, more natural, but still spiced with something bought from the perfume counter at the pharmacy.

It’s Derek who crouches down in front of the wolf, and raises his hand for the wolf to sniff. Derek’s gaze is wide.

The wolf whines against his palm, begging for something the man didn’t even know he needed. For forgiveness, perhaps.

 _Laura_.

Derek swallows, and nods, and the corner of his mouth quirks in something too complicated to be called a smile. Then he stands again, and walks away.

The wolf watches him go, his head tilted.

They are both works in progress.

And then there are fingers in his ruff, arms around him, and a face pressed against his neck.

_Stiles._

He smells of salt tears and pine needles.

The wolf leans into Stiles’s embrace, watching the loft over his shoulder as Stiles sniffles into his fur. Keeping guard. A sentinel.

Stiles is safe now, and the wolf will watch him always.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cliffhanger you're all really going to hate! :D

This isn’t a dream.

Peter is a wolf.

It feels like the rest of Stiles’s universe is crumbling into pieces, but the wolf is here, just like in his dreams. Stiles holds onto him because what else has he got to hold onto right now?

Scott—

Is this how friendships end? Stiles had thought theirs had been crumbling all summer, because of Theo and Donovan and everything else that went down. But apparently there been enough of it left to snap so clearly that Stiles can still feel the shock of it reverberating in his bones. There’s never any such thing as a clean break, is there?

“Stiles?” A warm hand touches his shoulder.

Stiles blinks up at Derek, and at the bottle of water he’s holding down to him. “Der? What the fuck just happened?”

“Peter shifted to protect you,” Derek tells him. He cracks the seal on the bottle of water and unscrews the cap. “Drink this.”

Yeah, well, unless it’s vodka, Stiles doesn’t think it’s going to help. But he unpeels himself from the wolf—from _Peter_ —and reaches out for the bottle. Takes a swig, then sets it down on the floor.

“But Peter can’t do the full shift.”

Okay, so he doesn’t need to see Derek’s eyebrows to do the judgey thing in order to know how ridiculous that sounds. Because clearly Peter can. Clearly Peter _has_.

Stiles looks the wolf in the eye, and it gazes back at him calmly. Stiles feels the same sense of peace steal over him that he knows from his dreams, from all the nights that he and Peter walked the Preserve together, following lonely paths under the starlight.

He looks at Derek again. “Scott?”

Derek knows exactly what question that name is really hiding.

“You’ll work it out,” Derek tells him quietly. “Nothing’s as broken as you think it is right now.”

Stiles nods slightly. He doesn’t feel it, not really, but who is he to argue? Derek knows broken.

“He’ll come crawling back,” Malia tells him. “You’re the brains of the pack, Stiles.”

Stiles looks across the room to find her standing with Lydia. She’s earnest and fierce, just like always.

Lydia smiles. “Actually, I prefer to think of myself as the brains of the pack,” she says. “Stiles is the heart.”

Stiles cards his fingers through Peter’s ruff, and thinks back to the yellow pin in the center of the valknut, to the way he always ended up at the same point when he was running in the Preserve.

Stiles thinks that maybe he isn’t the heart.

The Hales are.

They always have been.

 

***

 

Peter refuses to leave his side. He even wedges himself in the car when Derek drives Stiles home. Derek doesn’t ask Stiles if he wants Peter to go with him or not. He probably doesn’t have to ask: Stiles’s fingers have been hooked loosely in the wolf’s ruff for hours.

John is on night shift again and the house is dark when Stiles gets there. He fumbles for a moment before getting the key to turn in the lock, and then Peter is nosing the door open and letting himself in.

When Stiles was younger, he used to hate coming home to a dark house. And okay, maybe a part of him still hates it. His life is a horror movie. Of course he doesn’t like walking into dark houses. It’s good having Peter with him. He should have badgered his dad for a dog years ago.

And, no, he’s not going to tell Peter what he’s thinking. Except he kind of snorts, and Peter gives him a knowing look, ears flicking, and Stiles figures he’s busted.

“What?” he asks the wolf. “I could get you a squeaky rubber bone and everything.”

Peter huffs at him, and lopes up the stairs.

Stiles follows, trailing his fingertips along the wall.

Peter is already lying on his bed by the time Stiles gets to his room, and Stiles wants to curl up with him and lose the memory of the past few horrible hours to sleep. Except he’s also wrung out and gross from crying.

“I’m taking a shower,” he tells the wolf.

Peter thumps his tail against the bed.

Stiles heads down the hall to the bathroom. When he gets there he tries not to look at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He knows what he looks like. Pale and blotchy, with dark shadows under his eyes.

He strips off, covers his dressings with Saran Wrap, and climbs into the shower.

He tells himself he’s not going to think about Scott, so of course that’s exactly who his thoughts hone in on. Scott, who’s been his best friend since kindergarten. Scott, who’s been there for every big moment, good and bad, in Stiles’s life. Stiles’s ten year plan to get Lydia to fall in love with him, and the way Scott always smiled and agreed with him like it was something that was actually real, like scrawny, weird Stiles Stilinski ever had a hope with the rich, popular girl. The pair of them jumping up and down like idiots when Stiles got his license and his dad gave him the Jeep. Sleepovers throughout the years, where they used the cover of darkness to whisper about things they could never say in the light: Scott’s dad leaving, Stiles’s dad drinking too much, the things they were scared of and the things they didn’t know how to fix. Scott holding Stiles’s hand at his mom’s funeral, and building a blanket fort under the dining room table after it was over, and both of them just crawling inside to cry. Scott running back and forth to the kitchen for snacks and drinks so Stiles didn’t have to come out _ever_.

They were _brothers_.

Stiles closes his eyes and washes his fresh tears away under the shower.

The bathroom door creaks open. “Stiles?”

Peter. Peter’s shifted back to a man. And Stiles figures he should be embarrassed or something, because he’s naked in the shower, but he’s too tired for that.

“You’re upset,” Peter says, his voice quiet.

Stiles doesn’t bother confirm it, or deny it. What’s the point? He watches through the shower door as Peter steps closer, an indistinct, looming figure though the opaque glass. He hears the slight rattle of the towel rail as Peter pulls his towel free, and then Peter’s opening the door.

Stiles should be embarrassed.

He’s not.

What’s a little literal nakedness compared to every other kind he’s already shown Peter, both in his dreams and today in the loft?

“Come on, pup,” Peter says, holding out the towel.

Stiles twists off the taps and steps out onto the bathmat.

It’s as easy to move into Peter’s space here as it has been in any dream, even though it’s the man in front of him now, and not the wolf. There’s no trace of a smirk on Peter’s face as he folds the towel gently around Stiles. Nothing sharp in his gaze. Just calmness, quietness, the dreamscape bleeding over into their reality now. Everything is easier here.

Stiles closes his eyes as Peter towels him gently dry and unpeels the Saran Wrap from his dressings. Stiles’s skin prickles at each soft sweep of the towel. His dick twitches, but Peter just finishes rubbing Stiles’s hair dry, and then tucks the towel loosely around his hips.

He draws Stiles back to his bedroom, and for the first time Stiles notices what he’s wearing.

“Are those my _dad’s_ sweatpants?”

Peter raises his eyebrows. “Well, I figured that was slightly less strange than being completely naked.”

“Only slightly,” Stiles tells him.

“Well, this full shift is very new to me,” Peter tells him. “Perhaps I should keep a spare set of clothes wherever I’m likely to find myself.”

“And that’s here?” Stiles asks. He thinks that maybe he tries to make it a joke. _Ew, creeper wolf._ But it’s not a joke. It’s something he needs to know. He needs to know that Peter will be here. Will stay. That he won’t let Stiles be alone in the dark.

“Yes,” Peter says, his expression serious. “If you want me here, then yes.”

“Stay,” Stiles says, his voice catching on the word. “Please, Peter, please stay.”

Peter’s eyes flash blue, and he reaches out and curls his fingers around Stiles’s wrist. “For as long as you need, sweetheart.”

Then he tilts Stiles’s chin up with his free hand, and kisses him.

 

***

 

Stiles tugs at the short hair at the nape of Peter’s neck as they kiss, pressing himself almost frantically against him. There’s no rush of guilt, of shame. Only a rising desperation not to let go. To not ever let go. He sucks in a surprised breath when Peter’s tongue slides across the seam of his lips and encourages him to open, and then Peter’s swipes his tongue inside his mouth and Stiles thinks his heart stops beating.

This is Peter. This is his wolf. And in the moment that he has him, Stiles is suddenly afraid to lose him. He didn’t even know until right now how much this moment means, and he can’t—

He can’t lose him.

He _needs_ him.

And then Peter’s breath is hot against his jaw.

“Shh,” he murmurs. “Shh, sweetheart. I’ve got you. Don’t cry.”

Is he crying? Stiles raises a hand to his cheek to discover it’s true. He swallows. “Something’s wrong with me. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“It’s okay,” Peter whispers. He draws back slightly, his expression grave. “Stiles, do you know what a mating bond is?”

“What?” For a second Stiles is stunned. Then he pushes Peter away from him, his stomach clenching and bile rising in his throat. “Fucking _what_? Is this some kind of a joke? Or a spell? Did you _do_ this? Are you fucking me over like you did with Lydia?”

“No.” Peter shakes his head. “No, Stiles. I don’t know how it happened. I dreamed, and you were there. That’s all I know. You were there.”

Stiles hugs his arms to his chest. “So, what? Why does that have to mean something?”

Peter lifts his chin. “You’re not a fool, Stiles. We’re talking about shared dreams. Of course it means something. You walked with me in the woods. In the house. I was in hell in Eichen, and you were there every night to free me.” His lip curls into something almost like a snarl. “So don’t tell me it doesn’t _mean_ anything.”

Stiles is standing on a precipice. A part of him wants to dive off, to throw himself into the warmth and comfort of the dreams he shared with Peter, to make it _real_. The other part of him is afraid this is a trick—this is _Peter_ —and he’s certain that the fall will kill him.

“Tell me…” He curls his fingers into loose fists. “Tell me it’s not a lie.”

Not today.

Stiles can’t take any more hits today.

Peter steps forward and takes his right hand. Holds it up against his chest. Stiles can feel his heart beating.

“It’s not a lie, Stiles. I swear it’s not a lie.”

Stiles closes his eyes briefly. Peter’s heartbeat is steady, sure, but Stiles’s dull human senses have no way of knowing if he’s really telling the truth. Stiles opens his eyes again.

“I’ve never been very good at putting my faith in, well, faith,” he says.

Peter smiles ruefully. “Me neither.”

Stiles spreads his fingers across Peter’s chest. “But I don’t want you to leave.”

Peter exhales slowly, the tightness in his expression softening into something new, something unexpected.

Stiles kisses him.

It still feels like falling, but also like flying.

 

***

 

Stiles’s breath catches when Peter lays him out on the bed. He squirms, but Peter straddles his thighs, and it feels good to be anchored somehow. Peter rubs the jut of his hipbone, just above the towel, and then leans down to press a kiss to his collarbone. Stiles tilts his chin up, exposing his throat. Exposing the dressing covering the wounds the alpha left him. Peter presses his lips very gently to the bandage, and makes a rumbling sound in his throat not unlike a growl.

Stiles is hard, so hard, and it should feel wrong or weird or something, but it doesn’t. It feels right, and Stiles hasn’t felt right in a long time. He shivers under Peter’s hands, Peter’s mouth, and tries to rock up against him. Peter only leans back again, trailing his fingers down Stiles’s chest, over the dips of his ribs and down to his abdomen.

“No,” Stiles whispers. Of course Peter’s a tease. Except it’s not funny, because Stiles is slipping back into that desperate place he was when they first kissed. Every spiking nerve in his body is electric with urgency, and he’s almost panicking at the thought of not getting what he needs. “No, Peter, please!”

“Shh.” Peter leans down and brushes his mouth against Stiles’s. “I’m not going anywhere, Stiles.”

Stiles nods, bumping their noses together. “Lube. Top drawer.”

Peter draws back again, so he can hold Stiles’s gaze. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” It’s about the only thing Stiles is sure of in the world. “I want you to fuck me.”

“Oh,” Peter smirks. “A _romantic_.”

And just like that Stiles’s strange desperation recedes and he snorts out a laugh. Peter looks pleased, and climbs off Stiles long enough to fetch the lube. Stiles takes the opportunity to stretch his arms up above his head. He turns his head when he hears his drawer snick closed, and watches, his heart beating faster, as Peter hooks his thumbs into the sides of his borrowed sweatpants and slowly pushes them down.

Fuck.

He’s hot. Of course he’s hot. Stiles has always known that. He’s hung as well. Probably no longer than Stiles, but thicker, and uncut. That’s gonna… Stiles is gonna definitely feel that.

Peter doesn’t step toward the bed.

Stiles reads the unasked question on his face.

“Peter,” he says, and holds his hand out toward him. “I want you. Please.”

Peter steps forward. He runs his hand down Stiles’s chest again. Ends with his fingers dipping underneath the towel still wrapped around his hips. Stiles shifts slightly, raising his ass off the bed, and Peter pulls the towel gently away.

Doubts crowd in as his pale, scarred, mole-dotted body is revealed to Peter’s bright gaze.

Stiles meets Peter’s eyes anxiously.

“Beautiful,” Peter says, his voice reverent, almost a whisper. “My beautiful boy.”

“My wolf,” Stiles whispers back, and draws Peter down onto the bed.

 


	11. Chapter 11

Stiles’s nervous heartbeat is as rapid as a rabbit’s. Peter can almost see his heart thumping wildly under his ribs. His scent is sharp with anxiety. Peter presses against him, lending him his warmth, and is gratified when Stiles’s arms loop around his neck. He mouth is sweet. Too much sugar in his diet. Peter chases the taste with his tongue, and lets Stiles rock against him. The boy’s dick is hot and wet, dragging against Peter’s hip.

Peter draws back for a moment so he can read the expression on Stiles’s face. His eyes are wide. They are whiskey. They are amber. They are the color of sunlight falling across the dark oak panels of the house Peter grew up in.

Stiles swipes his tongue across his bottom lip. “Have you done this before?”

“I was a married man, Stiles.”

Stiles snorts, but his scent softens, his anxiety fading a little. “Like with a guy though?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Stiles nods. “I, um, I haven’t. With a guy.”

Oh, the wolf likes that. Likes that he’ll be the first to claim his mate in this way. The man sees the confession for what it is: not a way to stroke Peter’s ego, but a plea. He lifts Stiles’s hand and presses his mouth to his palm. “I won’t hurt you, Stiles.”

Stiles relaxes underneath him.

Peter shifts back into the space that opens up for him between Stiles’s legs. He takes the lube—the brand is cheap, and smells terrible—and squirts some onto his fingers. Stiles grimaces at the sound and snorts, and Peter smirks. Good. He’d rather hear Stiles laugh than cry again. A better man might even wait, given the day that Stiles has had and the emotional turmoil he’s in, but Peter’s never been accused of being a better man. He’s never even been accused of being a good man. That’s fine. Goodness is overrated. Cleverness has always been more Peter’s speed. He hears Talia’s voice in his head:

 _“Jesus, Peter, can’t you just play the damn game? Why do you always have to_ win _?”_

Peter had been about fourteen, he thinks. He’d looked down at the chessboard—chess, because Stiles is right and he’s a snob—and then looked up at Talia and shrugged. _“But the whole point is to win.”_

He’d been taught that from a very early age. Whatever the contest, whatever the stakes, winning was the only option. And yet, when it had come to the fire, Peter had lost. Kate Argent had outplayed him, and he’d never even known the game was on.

He wasn’t as clever as he’d thought, in the end. All the humility Peter has ever learned has been hard won, but now, in this moment, he is humble.

He slicks his fingers with lube and presses them against Stiles’s entrance. The boy is tight, nervous, but he doesn’t resist. A flush rises on his chest when Peter finally works a finger inside him. The flush deepens, and blooms on his throat, on his cheeks. He shifts, restless, uncomfortable, which is right when Peter twists his finger and nails his prostate.

“Holy shit!” Stiles shudders, his dick twitching against his abdomen. He clenches around Peter’s finger, and his legs jerk.

“You like that, sweetheart?” Peter asks him with a smirk.

Stiles lets out a huff of surprised laughter. “Oh, fuck yeah.”

“Mmm.” Peter hits his prostate again. “Imagine how good it’ll feel when it’s my cock inside you.”

Stiles groans, and reaches down to grip his dick. He jerks it lazily a few times, his long, clever fingers curling around his shaft while he thumbs the head. His slit glistens with moisture, and Peter’s mouth waters.

Well, he’s never been one to deny himself anything.

He hunches down and sucks the head of Stiles’s dick into his mouth. Let’s the taste of him explode over his tongue. He feels his eyes flash as the wolf prowls close to the surface of his skin.

“Yeah,” Stiles gasps. “You gonna give me what I need, Peter?”

Oh, and there’s his boy. There’s the boy who knows what he wants, and finds a way to get it. The boy who won’t back down. The boy who will always challenge him, whether it’s a fuck or a fight they’re facing.

Peter sucks a little harder in response, loving the way that Stiles squirms and rocks underneath him. And then, because he’s an asshole, he leans back up and smirks at Stiles, and slowly licks his lips.

Stiles’s hair is still damp from the shower, and his skin gleams with a thin sheen of sweat. Peter doubts he even knows how beautiful he is. He slips a second finger inside him, and Stiles tilts his pelvis up to make it easier for him.

One day Peter will spend hours mapping every inch of his skin, licking his scent from all his hidden places: from the crease of his thigh, from under his arm, from the sweat-slick hair at his temples. He’ll take hours, and leave Stiles a shivering mess afterward. But today is not that day.

He scissors his fingers inside Stiles, preparing him for his cock. By the time Peter judges him ready, Stiles is moaning and writhing, one hand still wrapped around his dick and the other one clawing the sheets.

“Ready for me, sweetheart?” Peter asks him, rubbing the head of his cock along Stiles’s inner thigh.

“Yeah, come on,” Stiles says. “Do it.”

It would be easier, Peter knows, with Stiles on his hands and knees. But the selfish part of Pater wants to see Stiles’s face as he’s breached for the first time. He slides his hands under Stiles’s thighs and lifts him, shifting him so that he’s settled against Peter’s thighs as he kneels on the bed. Stiles hooks his legs behind Peter’s back, as Peter grips his cock and guides it into position.

 _Mate_.

Stiles’s tight heat sucks him in.

Stiles freezes for a second, his scent sharpening with sudden panic. Then he moans, and rolls his hips, and Peter pushes all the way in.

So hot. So tight. So perfectly made for his cock.

He finds his rhythm. Loves the way each thrust pushes a sound out of Stiles: _uh uh uh_. Loves the way his boy’s scent is thick with need, and his dick is hard and glistening.

“Peter!” Stiles moans, shaking fingers curling around Peter’s wrist.

“What is it, pup?”

Stiles’s chest rises and falls heavily. “I want to ride you.”

Fuck yes.

Peter rolls them over, listening to the way Stiles’s breath hitches as the movement changes the angle of Peter’s penetration. Then Peter’s back hits the mattress, and Stiles is a vision of long, lanky limbs above him. He’s uncertain at first, his movements jerky and unpracticed. Peter holds his hips and helps guide him into a rhythm.

He’s beautiful.

He rides Peter for a few minutes at a time, stopping to catch his breath and steal kisses in between. Peter’s not sure if the boy has the stamina to finish like this, but in the meantime it’s a fucking delight to watch, so who cares? If he wears himself out, Peter will find them a better position. He wants to show them all to Stiles.

In the end Stiles flags, and Peter rolls them onto their sides. He thrusts into Stiles, one arm hooked over his hip, fingers linked with Stiles’s around Stiles’s dick.

“Come on, pup,” he whispers roughly in his ear. “Be a good boy and come for me.”

“Peter!” Stiles shudders against him as he obeys.

After that he’s slack, boneless, almost melting into the mattress while Peter finishes. Peter’s close, and it doesn’t take long. Just his mate’s scent, and a taste of the sweat darkening the hair on the nape of his neck. Peter comes hard and fast, panting against Stiles’s throat.

When Peter finally peels himself off his boy, Stiles snorts into his pillow.

“Ew, sticky and gross,” he mumbles.

Peter fetches a washcloth from the bathroom.

By the time he gets back, Stiles is asleep.

 

***

 

The Preserve smells like home. Peter noses along the ground for a while, following the scent of a squirrel, before he hears familiar footsteps falling into place beside him, and fingers tugging at his ears. He licks a stripe up the hand that Stiles offers him, and nudges him toward the path.

It’s dark, but the house is open. Warm light spills out from the windows, from the doors. Someone is cooking: Peter smells garlic and bacon. Even his wolf’s stomach rumbles at the promise of James’s carbonara.

 _“Just like my Nona used to make!”_ James always bragged, but Peter never believed it. He’d met James’s nona once, at Talia’s wedding, and he was pretty sure the only thing she ever cooked up involved a cauldron and the organs of small children she lured into her gingerbread cottage.

 _Sinistra_ , she’d called him approvingly.

The left hand.

Peter sniffs the air.

“We always come back here,” Stiles says, gazing at the house. “Is this what we were both looking for this whole time? The heart?”

Family. Pack. The heart of the Hale territory.

Peter nuzzles his nose into Stiles’s palm, and urges him toward the house.

 

***

 

Peter leaves before dawn. Stiles is clingy and mumbly, and won’t let him go without a series of kisses that start off sweet and end up possessive. The boy has bite. Peter has always liked that.

“Get some more sleep, pup,” Peter tells him. “I’ll see you at the loft later?”

“Yeah.” Stiles yawns and stumbles back toward bed.

Peter climbs out the window just as the sheriff’s cruiser is pulling up. Good. Peter wants to save that awkward conversation for never.

He’s reckless enough to shift and return to the loft as a wolf. The full transformation is still new to him, still wonderful, and he’s faster in this form that he has been in any other. He likes the way the neighborhood dogs freak the fuck out as he bounds past their tiny suburban territories.

He gets back to the loft just on dawn, and scrabbles at the door until Derek lets him in.

“You smell like Stiles,” Derek says, sleep-mussed.

Peter shifts back into his human form, and smirks a little.

“Scott’s gonna love that,” Derek mutters.

“At this point, dearest nephew,” Peter tells him, “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about Scott McCall’s opinion on anything.”

Derek snorts, but doesn’t disagree.

“Still,” Peter says, heading for the couch. “He _is_ the alpha, and I’ll be damned if I let anyone else walk in and try to take this territory.”

“You told Scott he didn’t deserve it.”

“Oh, he doesn’t,” Peter says. “But he _has_ it, and there’s still a remote chance that he might one day grow up enough to make a half-decent alpha. I might not be Scott’s greatest fan—” He ignores Derek’s side-eye. “—but this is definitely a case of better the devil you know. Or, well, the incompetent whining teenage brat you know.”

“I’m sure Scott will be delighted with your ringing endorsement,” Derek tells him. He looks Peter up and down as he lounges on the couch. “I’ll get you some pants.”

By the time he gets back, Peter has the remote control and is channel surfing. Derek throws a bundled-up pair of sweatpants at him, and Peter stands up long enough to pull them on. Then he slumps back on the couch again, and puts his feet on the coffee table.

Derek sits down beside him. “So.”

Peter arches his brows. “So?”

“So what’s the plan?” Derek asks him.

The plan?”

“You’ve always got a plan, Peter.”

True.

“The plan is that in order to keep this territory safe, one of us has to live here,” Peter tells him. “One of us has to be a part of the pack.”

Derek’s mouth becomes a thin line.

Peter thought as much.

Beacon Hills is nothing but bad memories for Derek. For Peter too, perhaps, but Derek has always been the sort of person who internalizes everything, and wallows in it. Peter doesn’t internalize. He pushes back. And, of course, there is nothing in particular tying Derek to Beacon Hills, whereas Peter has Stiles now. His mate.

“I’m not asking you to stay forever,” Peter says, gentling his tone. “But I am asking you to stay for a while. Someone needs to teach Scott how to be an alpha, and it’s never going to be me.”

He had tried, in a way. Forced Scott to make decisions that would challenge his precious morality. Forced him to see that the world isn’t black and white. Forced him into a confrontation and demanded he fight like a fucking alpha.

Peter was never Scott’s left hand, but he was the pack’s.

Always the pack’s, just like he was trained to be.

“I was a terrible alpha,” Derek says.

Peter shrugs. “You were better than me, Derek.”

“Yeah, well.” Derek snorts again. “You didn’t exactly set the bar high.”

“I did not,” Peter agrees. “But you remember how your mother dealt with things. You can teach him that. Talia was a good alpha.”

“Not always.” Derek glances quickly at Peter, and then away again.

There were times, Peter remembers, when he and Talia were close. And there were other times she looked at him like she didn’t know what he was, what to make of him. The left hand.

Sinister.

He hadn’t realized Derek had noticed.

“Well,” Peter says, staring at the TV screen and ignoring the lump in his throat. “We’re all works in progress.”

 


	12. Chapter 12

John is making pancakes when Stiles finally stumbles downstairs for breakfast and plants himself at the kitchen table.

“You look tired,” John says. “You sleep okay?”

Stiles mumbles something he hopes will pass for assent.

The batter sizzles in the pan, and John hums to himself as he cooks. Stiles rests his head on his folded arms, and tries not to doze off. His body aches pleasantly in all the right places.

His dad sets a stack of pancakes down in front of him. “Any reason I saw Peter Hale climbing out your window when I got home this morning?”

Stiles jolts upright. “What? No. What?”

“I also found a pair of my sweatpants in the front garden,” John says, raising his brows. “They looked a lot like the ones Peter was wearing when he climbed out your window. So maybe you want to remember that I’m a trained investigator while your brain flicks through what I’m sure would be a million creative excuses as to why Peter Hale was at some point naked in this house, and needed to borrow my sweatpants. And also why he ditched them when he left.”

That’s actually the easiest thing to explain.

“Peter can shift into a full wolf now,” Stiles says. “He came over last night, as a wolf. So when he shifted back there were nudity issues. And I guess maybe he went full wolf to get back to the loft again?”

“Huh,” John says, taking the seat opposite Stiles. “And he stayed the whole night?”

“Dad, um…” Stiles blinks. That’s what his dad is focusing on instead of the full shift bombshell? He blinks again. He’s got nothing. _Nothing_. All he can think is of how Peter fucked him last night, and how his _dad can tell_.

“Oh, kid,” John sighs. “I mean, you’re giving me so much here, you know? What do I disapprove of first? The age gap? Tempting, but you _are_ eighteen now, so even though I’m not ecstatic about that, I guess I have to let it slide. Is it that the guy is a werewolf? I’m not a fan of the fact he could rip your throat out, and before you call me out on being a bigot, this segues really well into the next thing. What’s the next thing, Stiles?”

Stiles wants to hide behind his pancakes. “Um, I’m gonna guess it’s the murder spree?”

“That’d be it,” John agrees. “The murder spree.”

“He’s not crazy anymore.”

“How reassuring,” John says, his tone dry. “For a second there I was worried, but as long as he was perfectly sane when he drove a metal pipe through Chris Argent’s stomach recently, then I guess that makes it all okay.”

“Dad. Stop. Just stop.” Stiles sucks in a deep breath. “I’m not an idiot, okay? I know who he is, and I know what he’s done. And I know it sounds crazy, but Peter’s got my back. He saved my life out on Three Mile Road, okay? And he’s never once looked at me like he thinks I’m some fucking piece of shit he can’t trust.”

John doesn’t even comment on his language. He frowns. “Hold on now. Who’s been looking at you like that?”

Stiles digs his fork into his pancakes. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Stiles.”

Stiles sighs. “Scott. We haven’t been right since… since summer. Then it all kind of blew up yesterday.”

“Are you okay?” John asks, holding his gaze.

“Yeah?” He doesn’t mean for it to sound quite so much like a question. “We’ll work something out, I guess. I mean, I’m maybe not pack anymore, but…” His throat suddenly hurts too much to keep talking.

His dad reaches out across the table and curls his blunt fingers around Stiles’s wrist.

It shouldn’t even be a thing, right? Stiles hasn’t felt like pack for months now. Not _that_ pack, full of people he hardly knows, where Stiles feels like a stranger. But it hurts to know that it’s Scott’s pack, and there’s maybe no place in it for him.

“So,” he manages at last. “So, um, Peter’s been helping me.”

“Ah, kid,” his dad says, with a long sigh. Then he smiles ruefully, and shakes his head.

“What?” Stiles asks. “Dad, what?”

“You didn’t even let me get in the zinger before you shut me down,” John tells him.

“What zinger?”

“You know.” John looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cringe. “The one where he’s your ex-girlfriend’s father.”

Oh yeah. That zinger.

Stiles groans and covers his face with his hands.

John stands up and comes around to hug him from behind.

“You’re actually taking this better than I thought you would,” Stiles mumbles, turning his face into his dad’s uniform shirt.

“Son,” John says. “I’m fucking _livid_.” He hugs Stiles tighter. “Not with you. You should never have been out on Three Mile Road. It put the pack, it put _you_ , in unnecessary danger. Scott should never have taken you out there.”

Stiles closes his eyes.

His dad kisses the top of his head. “So I’m glad someone’s got your back, kiddo, even if it is Peter Hale.”

 

 

***

 

“Why are you picking me up?” Malia asks when she climbs into the Jeep. “Lydia was supposed to pick me up. We were going to get coffee before we went to the loft.”

“You hate getting coffee,” Stiles reminds her. Malia is not good with the complicated questions that baristas ask. Or with lines. Or with anywhere there are people.

“I know.” Malia rolls her eyes. “But Lydia says I need to work on my interpersonal skills.”

Yeah, that sounds like something Lydia would say.

Stiles grinds the Jeep into gear and heads for the loft. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“What?”

Stiles is glad to have the excuse of driving so he doesn’t need to look at her. Because he’s a coward. “It’s about me and Peter.”

“What about you and Peter?”

“We maybe, um…” Fucked? Hooked up? _Mated?_

“Had sex?” Malia asks.

Stiles almost drives into the back of the Lexus in front of them. He slams on the brakes just in time to avoid a collision, and turns his head to stare at her.

“What?” she asks. “I can smell it all over you. It’s kind of gross.”

“You don’t sound very surprised.”

She frowns. “Why would I be surprised? He fought for you and he won. Then when he was a wolf he wouldn’t let Scott near you. It was pretty obvious. That’s how it works, right?”

Stiles almost laughs at that. Yeah, it’s how it works in the animal kingdom, which, after all this time, still makes more sense to Malia than human society. “So you don’t mind?”

“Why would I mind?” A look of understanding crosses her face at last. “Is it because he’s my father and it’s weird?”

“Yeah.” Stiles bites his lip. “It’s really weird.”

“Why?” Malia asks. “Do you think we’re going to talk about the things you do in bed? Like that face you make?”

Oh Jesus.

“Please don’t,” Stiles rasps.

“I won’t.” Malia shrugs. “I don’t care. You and me aren’t together. We can both have sex with whoever we want, right?”

“Right,” Stiles agrees.

“You’re not my boyfriend anymore. I’m not going to fight him for you,” Malia tells him. Then she leans over and punches him in the shoulder. “But if he’s a dick to you, I’ll probably have to fight him for that.”

Warmth floods through Stiles, and bleeds away the tension he’s been holding in his muscles. The blast of a horn behind them lets Stiles him the light is green. He shifts the Jeep into gear again.

“Hey, if you and Peter get married one day, you’ll technically be my step-dad,” Malia adds thoughtfully, and Stiles almost runs up the ass of that damned Lexus again.

 

***

 

It’s not exactly an ambush, given that Peter texted Stiles to let him know Scott and the pack would be there, but Stiles still feels a little like he’s been blindsided when he walks into the loft. Scott’s here, with Liam and Hayden and Mason and Corey.

“Hey,” Stiles says.

Scott lifts his nose like he’s catching his scent. “Hey,” he says, before shooting a narrow look at Peter.

Well, so there’s no point trying to hide it. Stiles heads for the couch and sits beside Peter. Peter’s arm comes around his shoulders. Lydia raises her eyebrows at Stiles, and his face heats up.

“Okay,” Derek says. “Things got a little heated last night—”

Stiles snorts, and Peter smirks proudly.

“Not what I was referring to,” Derek says, his eyebrows judging them. “Peter and I have talked about it, and we’ve come up with what we think is a solution that will suit everyone.”

Stiles swallows and glances at Scott. A twisted knot of anxiety settles in his gut. Peter curls his fingers around his shoulder.

“A divided pack can’t stand,” Derek says. “And what you have here, Scott, is a divided pack. You need to step up and fix that.” His tone is gentle but firm. “I can help you, if you’re willing to listen.”

There are bags under Scott’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t sleep at all last night. He looks worriedly at Stiles, and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I want to make things right again.”

Something unclenches inside Stiles, but they’ve been here before, right? He can’t get his hopes up. Not if Scott’s just going to crush him again.

“I mean it, Scott,” Derek tells him. “You really have to listen, because I’m going to be telling you a lot of things you won’t like hearing.”

Scott’s expression falters for a second, and then he nods again. “I’ll listen.”

“Wait though,” Liam says with a frown. “Scott’s a true alpha! Why should he listen to you?”

Derek rolls his eyes.

“Former alpha,” Peter interjects, pointing at Derek. Then he taps himself on the chest. “Also former alpha. We are both born wolves, both of whom can do a full shift, with more grasp of werewolf traditions and history in our little fingers than you, whatever your name is, have in your entire body. The Hales have owned this territory for almost two centuries. In that time we’ve faced more threats than you can possibly imagine. But please, do feel free to ask your question again.”

Liam curls his lip in a snarl.

“Liam, stop,” Scott says, putting a hand on his beta’s shoulder. He looks at Derek again. “You said last night that you’re not pack, and that I need a Hale in my pack.”

Derek gazes back at him steadily.

“Hello?” Peter asks. “Elephant in the room, right here.”

Stiles elbows him in the ribs.

“If Derek isn’t pack, how can you be?” Scott asks Peter.

Lydia sighs and rolls her eyes. “Scott, he’s mated to your left hand. _That_ makes him pack. Even I can figure that out, and I’m not a wolf.”

Scott gapes.

“Mated?” Corey pipes up. “Does that mean like werewolf married?”

Peter stares at him incredulously. “No, it means _mated_. Have you never watched National Geographic?”

“Pretty sure I was mated to my left hand for a while in junior year,” Mason adds, and then flinches when Peter growls. “But of course it means something entirely different in this context.”

“Peter,” Derek says.

Stiles snorts again. Good luck getting this conversation back on track.

“Yes,” Derek says. “Peter and Stiles have a mate bond. That makes Peter part of Stiles’s pack, if Stiles still has a place in the pack.” He raises his eyebrows at Scott.

“Stiles…” Scott’s voice threatens to break on Stiles’s name. He sounds nervous, like he’s suddenly afraid that he really could lose Stiles forever. He’s pushed him away all summer, but now it’s different?

Stiles sucks in a deep breath. “Do you want me to stay in your pack, Scott?”

“Yes!” Scott looks horrified that he’d even ask, and Stiles wants to punch him in the face, because has he been paying no fucking attention at all?

“Because of the Hale treaties, or because of me?” Stiles asks, holding his breath as he braces for the answer. “All of me, Scott. Not just the parts you like, or the parts you understand. _All_ of me.”

And all of him, Stiles knows, now includes Peter. 

“Stiles.” Scott blinks, and then reaches up to scrub at his eyes. “You’re my _brother_.”

“What does that mean though?” Stiles asks. He folds his shaking hands in his lap. “What does that _mean_?”

“It means…” Scott draws a deep breath and looks around at everyone watching. “It means that I’ll listen, okay? I’m sorry, and I’ll listen.”

A part of Stiles wants to leap to his feet and rush forward into Scott’s embrace. A deeper, colder part of him won’t let him expose himself like that.

He nods at Scott instead. “Okay,” he says, his voice even. “Prove it.”

Scott’s jaw works for a moment before he actually manages to get the words out. “H-how do I—”

“This isn’t a hackneyed romance, Scott,” Peter cuts in suddenly. He raises his eyebrows. “You don’t get to chase after him at an airport, or turn up in the cafeteria to serenade him. There’s no grand gesture to be made here, understand? Nothing is ever that simple, or that clichéd. Not even _you_ , Scott, although it pains me to admit it.”

Scott ignores the insult, his wet gaze cutting back to Stiles again.

“I’ll listen,” Scott says, his voice more firm this time. “I’ll listen, Stiles.”

Stiles nods again, and curls his fingers through Peter’s.

  

***

 

“Well, what did you expect, sweetheart?” Peter asks Stiles later when he joins him on the balcony. The air is cold, and smells faintly of distant smoke. Below them, the wind is rattling a tin can around on the street. “Bloodshed?”

Stiles huffs out a laugh. “From you? I dunno.” He shrugs. “Maybe at least some more fireworks?”

Peter leans on the railing. “Well, not everything is fireworks. Sometimes the things that break down take hard work and patience to build up again.”

Stiles knocks their shoulders together. “That’s kind of the last thing I expected to hear coming from you.”

“I didn’t say it was my preferred method.” Peter puts an arm around him.

“Mmm.” Stiles gazes out into the night. “You gonna teach me how to be a left hand?”

“I’m not sure there’s that much I could teach you,” Peter tells him, his tone thoughtful. “You’re smart and you’re ruthless when you need to be. Those are pretty much the qualifications. But we can go through the books in the vault whenever you like. See if there’s anything there you haven’t seen yet. Clearly Scott will never take my advice on anything and, honestly, I doubt I’ll ever see him as my alpha in the way that my mother was, or Talia. You’re his left hand, Stiles, not me. And I’m sure the territory will be safer because of it.”

“You’re retiring from the position then?” Stiles teases gently.

“The pay was shit and the hours were terrible,” Peter smiles. “And I’m not retiring, exactly. Just handing you the reins.”

Stiles shivers. He’s still not entirely sure what it means to be the left hand. He’s not sure if he can do it, or if he’s ready for it. “Is it lonely though?”

Peter turns his head and brushes his lips to Stiles’s forehead. “Not anymore.”

Stiles lifts his gaze to the sky. The stars aren’t as bright here in town as they are in the Preserve. The sky isn’t as depthless as it appears from under the trees, on the paths that he and Peter walk in their dreams, although of course it is.

It’s infinite.


	13. Chapter 13

_Ten months later_

 

“Oh, wow, Stiles, you look like a stripper!” Corey exclaims when he opens the loft door to him.

“Dude, really?” Stiles asks, looking down at his uniform. He doesn’t know whether to be flattered or outraged.

John steps in beside him. “You gonna tell me I look like a stripper too, Corey?”

“Um, no!” Corey exclaims, going bright red. “Not that you’re not—um, I mean, I would totally…oh god.”

Mason drags him away before he can embarrass himself any further.

Malia grins at Stiles and takes a photograph of him on her phone. “I’m sending this to Peter. It’s hot.”

Stiles opens his mouth to tell her Peter’s got plenty of hot pictures of him, but then snaps it shut again as he remembers who he’s with.

“How’s the first shift going?” Derek asks.

“Totally non-exciting,” Stiles says. “Apart from when I was literally so excited just about being there that I couldn’t sit still. Dad made me patrol Main Street on foot for two hours just to get me the hell out of the station.”

“You were _fidgeting_ ,” John says, like that excuses it.

“Anything on the body?” Lydia asks, cutting straight to the chase.

Well, it’s why they’re there.

“Random hiker,” Stiles tells her. “And yes, for once it was a mountain lion. Seriously. A mountain lion.”

“Forensics confirmed it,” John agrees. “So nothing for the pack to get involved in.”

Liam opens his mouth.

“No,” Stiles says firmly. “Yes, I know exactly what you’re going to say. And no, you can’t hunt it down, because it’s bad enough there’s a mountain lion attacking hikers. If it’s killed by something even scarier, people are going to freak the hell out.”

Liam looks to Scott.

“Stiles is right,” Scott says, looking up briefly from the map of the Preserve spread out on the table to flash him a quick smile. “Leave it to the rangers.”

John claps Stiles on the shoulder. “Come on, kid. Back to work for us.”

“Okay. Catch you guys later.”

He follows his dad back down the stairs.

“You should have told Scott to schedule the meeting for later,” John tells him.

Stiles shrugs as he follows him over to the cruiser. “It’s cool. I’m not missing much.”

There’s a difference, Stiles knows now, in missing a few pack meetings here and there because of other commitments, and being shut out.

Pack meetings lately have been okay. Over the past few months Stiles and Scott have fallen back into the old, familiar patterns of their friendship, before it was soured. Maybe they’re not quite as easy and comfortable together as they were once, but Peter’s right. These things take time and patience to rebuild. And Stiles thinks that they’ll probably never be as open and unguarded as they were in the past, but that’s maybe not a bad thing. Friendships change, and evolve. They’re adults now, not kids. Just because it will never be the same as it once was, that’s okay.

They’ve both grown up a lot recently. Stiles has been busy with the academy, and Scott has been busy learning what he can from Derek. They’re both, as Peter would say, works in progress.

Peter doesn’t come to many pack meetings, but Stiles always gives him a full run down, often with Malia or Derek filling in the gaps. Derek’s still in Beacon Hills, but Stiles knows he won’t stay for much longer. He’ll come back when he needs to be with pack—and pack, for Derek, really only means Peter and Malia. Stiles too, though Derek won’t ever admit it—but Beacon Hills isn’t home for him anymore. Eventually, Stiles knows, Derek will find someone and join their pack instead. Finally break free of the past, shake off the ashes of his life in Beacon Hills, and actually figure out how to be happy, how to be whole again. He deserves it.

“So it’s all good now?” John asks warily. He knows it hasn’t been an easy transition for Stiles, which is why Stiles thinks he insisted on coming up to the loft with him instead of waiting in the cruiser. “Between all you kids?”

“Yeah, Dad. It’s all good.” Stiles heads for the driver’s side of the cruiser. “It’s my turn to drive, right?”

“Nope,” John says.

“Dad! Come on!”

“I’m the sheriff, rookie,” John tells him with a grin, jangling the keys. “It’s always my turn to drive.”

 

***

 

It’s late by the time Stiles finishes up his patrol log and finally escapes the station. He climbs into his Jeep and heads for home.

Home.

The road winds through the Preserve. The beams from the headlights bounce off the trees, startling a lone fox. Stiles knows every turn in the road now. He shifts the Jeep into a lower gear as he slows on the last bend, and the house appears.

It’s not a replica of the house that stood here before. That would have been too painful. This house is smaller, the design more modern. There’s still a wide porch out the front though, complete with the hammock Stiles insisted they buy.

The lights are on in the house, warm and welcoming.

Stiles parks the Jeep beside Peter’s car and climbs out. By the time he walks up the steps onto the porch, Peter is leaning in the square of light of the open doorway, his arms folded over his chest.

“Deputy,” he says with a smirk.

Stiles touches the brim of his hat. “Mr. Hale.”

“Oh, I like the way you say that,” Peter says. “Very respectful. Did you bring your handcuffs home?”

“Nooo, Peter! I’m too tired to play naughty cop tonight!”

Peter clutches at his heart. “You? Too tired to frisk me?”

Stiles closes the space between them and leans against him. “Mmm. I’m tired. Wanna sleep.”

“Dinner first,” Peter tells him. “Then a bath. Then you can sleep, sweetheart.”

“You made me dinner?” Stiles mumbles, pressing his face into the juncture of Peter’s throat.

Peter’s arms come around him. “Well, I made you toast.”

Stiles snorts. “You are the worst.”

“I really am,” Peter agrees, and draws him inside the house.

 

***

 

The Preserve is deep and dark, but Stiles is never afraid with his wolf by his side. In his dreams, he doesn’t tire; he and Peter can walk for hours here, while at the same time they lie curled up together in their bed, faces close, sharing their breath.

Leaves and twigs crunch under Stiles’s feet as they walk. He keeps a hand curled in Peter’s ruff, laughing as Peter dislodges him and darts forward suddenly to investigate a squirrel or a mouse that skitters in the underbrush.

Here, in the heart of their territory, Stiles is safe.

They reach a clearing, and Stiles stops to sit on a tree stump. Its surface is mossy and soft. Peter sits beside him, and stretches so he can rest his chin on Stiles’s knee. Stiles runs his fingers up the long bridge of his nose, and Peter’s tail thumps and his eyes half close. Then Stiles tugs his ears gently, and leans down to kiss his nose.

Peter licks a stripe up the side of his face.

“Ew!” Stiles exclaims, and Peter huffs.

The night is warm.

A breeze rustles the leaves of the trees, a whispered symphony that fills the air all around them.

Stiles moves to sit on the ground, and puts his arms around Peter.

They gaze up at the sky.

The Preserve is deep and dark, and the stars are infinite.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone for reading! Your kudos and comments made it easier to keep up the crazy momentum.


End file.
